Voters have a responsibility to the innocent to fix ambiguous sexual assault legislation
politics
My sister’s 17 year old friend, Chelsea King, is dead. She was raped and murdered while running in a park, and the man currently held in custody and charged with the crime is a registered sex offender.
You may have seen the missing person signs up at crosswalks like Strathmore and Gayley. The entire city of San Diego has been shaken, a crime like this is so extreme that it’s hard to believe that it is real.
The problem of sex offenders is very real, and it is time for this country to mobilize—how many more young girls have to die before we implement policies to make sure we are safe?
Laws regarding sex offenders need change and they need change now. The title “sex offender” ranges from serial rapists to 18 year olds who have sex with their 17 year old boyfriend or girlfriend. It is quite obvious that these are different degrees of crime. And though the law differentiates between the two, the punishments for sex offenders are light for the case of the former and too extreme for the case of the latter.
It is time to implement a better system, where sex offenders can be distinguished and labeled by clearly differentiated crimes, in which the degree of their offense can be made known to the public. This is necessary for Megan’s Laws to be effective—people have to be aware of the dangers in their neighborhood, and the effect of the label “sex offender” is much lessened if it includes every high school senior who got caught “doing it” in the back of a car.
The highest class of sex offender would obviously be the rapist and murderer, who is an undeniable danger while loose in any community. And the lowest class of sex offender probably includes the high school guy who just found out her dad is a lawyer. Punishments for these different classes should be more varying so that those who deserve harsh punishments do not have their jail time reduced to prevent those with lighter crimes from also serving the same number of years in prison.
It is very important that we make the punishment fit the crime. Some crimes though, are unforgivable, and we cannot be afraid to give life sentences to the criminals that will continue to hurt children and young women. This desire to rape is an illness, a sick perversion that is not going to be cured by any amount of government rehabilitation. It is sheer optimism to think that the worst will ever be fit for our community.
These people who commit these acts never just do it by accident and we do not have the luxury to assume they just do it once. So often when a girl is raped or murdered, it is a person who is already known by the law to be a sex offender. Why do we allow rapists or those who attempted rape to prowl our streets? We as a society need to agree that rape is not worth tolerating.
With the death of someone this close to me, I need to see the desperate improvements we in our justice system. After his first crimes, a psychiatrist had declared that this man was remorseless and a continued danger to society. Yet he was still released. Even that was not enough to save Chelsea King. It is on us if we allow incidents like these to continue to happen. This incident was not a fluke, it was proof of a serious flaw in our justice system.
I, like Chelsea King, run everyday and often by myself. Let’s decide to actually make this country safer, before more innocent people have to suffer.