Posted by SarahQ on August 9, 2005, 4:39 am, in reply to "Vocal minorities, silent majorities & society sometimes divided evenly" In the last month, I have seen a miscarriage of justice so flagrant that it merits a crusade and it makes me angry that there’s nothing much I can do about it. Yes, I was dating the exhibitionist in question, and my family didn’t even particularly mind. I’ve dated my share of people and none of them ever treated me as well as he did. I hold a midlevel position at a major corporate company and he’s a blue-collar worker; in his world, I was a princess and he never failed to treat me accordingly. He told me on the first date about his past, and I thought he was joking. I told my parents and they didn’t have any issue with what he had done either. I didn’t really plan to date him long-term, but he never did anything to merit a breakup, so months went by. When I recently bought another house, he wanted to move in. Suddenly his past began to affect my life. One night, not long after the move, his surveillance officer showed up after 9:00 pm: came in and looked all through my mess of a house still being unpacked, searched his vehicle, inquired about mine. I have nothing to hide—I am a squeaky-clean, law-abiding citizen who has actually inquired with a police recruiter within the last year and a half—but I was upset by this intrusion. But that was nothing compared to when I found out that the surveillance officer had gone to my former neighbors on this same evening looking for him, flashing his badge at this late hour and all but citing his case history when he had never formally lived there and when he (the surveillance officer) had the new address, which my friend had already supplied to his probation officer. I had a horrific flash of what could happen if this ham-handed idiot pulled the same maneuver in my new neighborhood, which is full of families and people who have lived here for decades. The same sort of thinking that has made exhibitionists into “dangerous felony sex-offenders” could easily make me a neighborhood pariah, I feared. My mother, who has many friends in law-enforcement, got on the phone and was told that they could come and search whenever they want, intimating that by letting him into my home, I, too, have given up my civil rights to a certain extent. She knows what buttons to push; she pointed out all the reasons I had to break up with him at this horribly inopportune moment and I knew she was right, so I did. Inopportune, because all this trouble has been caused by my friend failing polygraph tests. Based on my research, I have reasonable doubt that he was failing because he was lying, but obviously, probation officers believe 99.9 percent of people who fail a polygraph are definitely lying-scumbag criminals (though the other .1 percent probably are). They had just put him on curfew, cleverly removing every activity that makes him healthy. At that moment, I broke up with him, and the following week, having shelled out more money and driven a long way to another city to take a polygraph with someone with whom he had good rapport in the past, he not surprisingly failed it a third time. Now he is on house arrest, presumably until he manages to pass a polygraph, sitting behind the four walls of his empty apartment in a cruddy neighborhood—as if this is going to help him do so when he’s just failed three in a row while telling the truth. I know I’m selfish for bailing on him when he most needed the support of his close friends. I have already thoroughly berated myself for that. I know that I hardly deserve to call myself a friend because I might have been able to do something to help, but can’t. I may not know any lawyers, but I know something better: journalists. I used to work for a newspaper and many of my friends are still in the business and one, last I checked, is still associated with a major local publication that lives to dig up lengthy tales of abuse and injustice. But I can’t bring myself to admit to my friends and colleagues that I was dating a felon, let alone a felon convicted of what he did. Only my parents and my closest friend know. So I’m angry. I’m angry at myself and I’m angry at a screwed-up legal system which is wasting its time hounding and harassing a harmless flasher who hasn’t even done it in years. As a taxpayer, I am paying for an organized institution to destroy the lives of people like my friend who have never done a substantive harmful thing to anyone—and as a taxpayer, I think I’d rather my money go for catching people who have. SarahQ
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Message modified by board administrator August 9, 2005, 5:01 am
(Originally posted circa April/May 2001)
SarahQ70@hotmail.com
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