T wo middle school boys in Oregon are scheduled for trial on Aug. 20 to face charges of harassment and sexual abuse for allegedly slapping female classmates on the rear end in February.
According to ABC News, Cory Mashburn and Ryan Cornelison, both 13, face up to 10 years in jail and a lifetime as registered sex offenders if convicted, all over a stunt Mashburn claims was practiced by girls and boys alike every Friday during school.
Bradley Berry, the district attorney who appears to be doing his best Mike Nifong impression by prosecuting the boys seemingly for doing little more than acting like kids, maintains that his office “aggressively” pursues sex crimes that involve children. “These cases are devastating to children,” Berry said. “They are life-altering cases.”
Berry is correct, though he isn’t referring to Mashburn and Cornelison, whose lives he’s apparently trying to destroy single-handedly. Instead, he perversely suggests that teenage girls are going to be ruined for life because a couple of 13-year-olds behaving like clowns smacked them on the backside.
Mashburn and Cornelison’s alleged behavior admittedly was inappropriate and deserves punishment, but it was hardly criminal. Berry is charging the boys as if they’d dragged girls into a bathroom stall and demanded sexual favors. In short, intent matters, and so far there’s virtually nothing to suggest that these boys — indeed, “lots of kids at school,” according to Mashburn — engaged in anything other than silly, childish antics.
According to Julie McFarlane, supervising lawyer at the Juvenile Rights Project in Portland, Ore., Mashburn and Cornelison will be forced to register as sex offenders if convicted on any of the counts of sexual abuse, which means they’ll “have to follow the same sex-offender registration requirements as someone who brutally raped someone.”
This is patently absurd. The state compels taxpayers to payfor public education; public school administrators laud the pedagogical advantages of social interaction; and then, when little kids actually notice the sexual developments that are taking place within and around them and act in manners that can probably be described as perfectly normal for their age, in swoops the state-dispatched prosecutor seeking to lock them away for years and have them labeled as pariahs of society for the rest of their miserable lives.
If anyone deserves to be on trial here, it’s Bradley Berry, who initially charged Mashburn and Cornelison with felony sexual abuse (as if the boys had actually raped the girls). The boys’ defense lawyers have rightly filed prosecutorial misconduct charges with the court, alleging that Berry unfairly selected Mashburn and Cornelison for prosecution and added charges when the boys refused to plea bargain.
It’s inappropriate for anyone to initiate unwanted physical contact with someone else. However, whether this actually constitutes criminal activity has to be balanced against intent to do harm, the severity of the action and, in the case of these 13-year-old boys in particular, maturity level.
When Berry states that his office “aggressively” pursues sex crimes that involve children, he’s referring to laws that were undoubtedly written to protect children from predatory adults, not from other children. Certainly these laws can apply to children who commit crimes against their peers in proportion to those committed by adults, but it simply defies reason to argue this is the case here. One would think a district attorney, of all people, should know the difference.
Few cases better demonstrate the extent of the government’s coercive powers and its monopoly on the use of force than this. Talk about child abuse.
Trevor Bothwell is a Maryland freelance writer who blogs at Who’s Your Nanny?
