Charges Dropped Against Oregon "Sex Offender" Boys

Remember the Oregon boys charged with criminal sexual assault for slapping teh behinds of female classmates? Well a judge has dropped the charges after the boys made a public courtroom apology to their "victims."

Pressure has been building on prosecutors to drop the charges against Cory Mashburn and Ryan Cornelison, with critics saying they had blown the matter out of proportion and were overzealous. Four girls listed as victims by prosecutors joined in the call for charges to be dropped.

Judge John Collins said Monday his decision was in the "interest of justice."

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They were originally charged with felony and misdemeanor sex abuse charges in February.

Amid growing public opposition to sending the boys to prison and putting them on a sex offenders' registry, prosecutors dropped the felony sex abuse charges and added misdemeanor harassment charges, then later dropped all sex abuse charges, leaving only the harassment counts.

The judge dismissed the final charges following negotiations between prosecutors and the defense, and discussions with the four girls about whether they wanted the case dismissed.

The boys apologized to the girls in the courtroom Monday.

What is most troublesome about this particular case is that a public apology before the school could have saved these boys and their families the expense of a trial, saved the taxpayers the expense of all the pre-trial activity, and the public outcry that has embarassed the prosecutor's office.

As I noted in a previous post, there may be room for the boys to sue both the principal and the school's assigned police officer for infringement upon their rights, including a custodial interrogation without their Miranda rights and without their parents present.

Betsy Newmark comments:

Can't we have some return to common sense when dealing with children? A good principal can deal with this sort of problem at school by meeting with the kids and their parents and than meting out some appropriate punishment. For example, I'd recommend that kids who have their minds in the gutter mind benefit from after-school service cleaning bathrooms at the school. Whenever I proposed such punishments when I taught in middle school I was told that we weren't allowed to assign kids such labor as any sort of discipline. After or in-school suspension when they'd sit in a study hall and do homework and then read a book was the preferred punishment. Somehow I think that scrubbing a toilet or two or emptying garbage cans would be more of a deterrent than sitting in an air-conditioned study hall. But we need to get away from criminalizing piggish behavior.

I couldn't agree more with a little manual labor punishment.

The purpose of a punishment is to remind the students of their poor behavior. The punishmnent must be a significant disruption to their normal routine that they are forced to think about their actions and why they are being punished. In-school or after school suspenstion or detention is not a disruption, in fact it is a study hall-a sort of benefit.

In this case, I think a little punishment for the prosecutors is in order. Threatening the boys with a life-long "sex offender" tag is beyond the pale in this case and cannot be simply forgotten. But these prosecutors will have no punishment or reprobation, but these boys will forever be scarred by the process. Yes, they should have been punished for their behavior, but they did not need to be hauled into court for that punishment to stick.