The boy involved in the crime, the son of a friend, was playing video games at her apartment. He could certainly be considered a victim. But Taylor, who, court records showed, had herself been molested as a child, was also a victim. She was intoxicated when she approached the boy and at trial appeared immensely concerned and embarrassed about what had transpired. Unfortunately, Nevada lawmakers had stiffened the statute a year before her offense, changing the mandatory minimum penalty to life, with no possibility of parole for at least ten years. If she’d killed the boy, she might have done less time. Taylor had no prior history of sexual misconduct, and the examining psychologist said she was unlikely to commit another offense.
Most U.S. state and local governments operate under a system of checks and balances, like that built into the federal constitution. State legislators can be restrained by a savvy governor; governors can be restrained by impartial judges. And prosecutors can skirt certain statutes by charging defendants with lesser offenses. In Taylor’s case, Elko County district attorney Gary Woodbury contended that the defendant refused to consider a plea bargain that would force her to register as a sex offender. However, it’s not entirely clear that she was offered any sort of deal at all. Plus, the jury on the case wasn’t informed that the offense carried a mandatory life sentence. If the court hides the minimum penalty from the jury, the statute is likely unfair.
After FAMM heard about the Taylor case and news media started sniffing around, Woodbury decided to place the blame on the Nevada legislature, noting that in 2007 it had amended the state’s lewdness statute by imposing a blanket mandatory life sentence for all offenders. “I don’t agree that the Nevada… Legislature should have made this a mandatory sentence,” he told KOLOTV. “I think it’s dumb. But they didn’t ask me about that.” Since Taylor was found guilty of precisely what she’d done, he said, his office had no other choice and had steered a correct course.2
Then, the judge openly questioned why Taylor hadn’t been offered a plea bargain, which blew a hole in the district attorney’s story. The legislation had basically demoted the judge to the rank of clerk. At sentencing time, he couldn’t consider the report from the psychologist or Taylor’s extensive personal history as a victim of sexual and physical abuse. Nor did he have an opportunity to determine what punishment might actually be fair.
Taylor’s public defender, Alina Kilpatrick, researched the law and found only two other women sentenced in Nevada for lewdness with a child under fourteen. Both received plea bargains.3 The first defendant, who ultimately received two to five years in prison and probation, pled guilty to attempted incest for engaging in oral sex with her son. The second woman was given a plea bargain for two counts of attempted lewdness for participating in the sexual abuse of her daughter with her husband. She was sentenced to four to twenty years.4
Taylor appealed her case on the grounds that her punishment was unconstitutionally cruel and unusual. Her attorney said it was the harshest sentence ever dealt to a female sex offender in Nevada. The state of Nevada, rather than admit it made a mistake, was clinging to its guns and claiming Taylor’s sentence was perfectly legitimate. The law remained on the books, and Taylor remained in prison.
Anyone who reads the news on a regular basis has, in recent years, come across stories about female teachers having sex with boys who were their students. For this book, I researched crimes involving victims around the age of thirteen, and I couldn’t find any first-time offender who received a sentence as harsh as Taylor’s—even though many of those cases involved repeated sexual encounters.
Anne Knopf, thirty-nine, a substitute teacher in Ellsworth, Wisconsin, confessed that she’d had sex with a thirteen-year-old pupil on several occasions. She was sentenced in July 2008 to nine months in jail (time she’d already served while waiting for the case to be resolved). The judge also ordered her to register as a sex offender and to stay away from boys under eighteen for the next five years.5 If we agree that Taylor’s sentence was appropriate, clearly Knopf should have gotten the electric chair. But she didn’t, and it’s unlikely the republic is any less safe because of it.
Another teacher, Pamela Rogers Turner, twenty-seven, of McMinniville, Tennessee, was convicted of having sex on several occasions with one of her thirteen-year-old male students, and she continued communicating with him over the Internet even after her original arrest.6 Turner was ultimately charged with four counts of sexual battery and violation of probation. Her sentence was 270 days in prison plus an eight-year suspended sentence and seven years and three months of probation. She also had to register as a sex offender and surrender her teaching certificate for life.
The lawmakers who fashioned the ironclad statute that nailed Taylor seemed to have a picture in their mind of what sort of crime would fall under its umbrella, but that picture didn’t come close to dealing with the range of possibilities. The legal storm that struck Taylor was the logical result of a system that can make profoundly far-reaching decisions without having to put much thought into them. She became just one of many casualties who wind up forgotten, sitting in an iron capsule, where they’re cut off from everything but the slow passage of time.
Every day judges see defendants like Taylor who are astonished to discover how harsh penalties can be and how years and years of imprisonment trip off the tongues of functionaries as though they hold no importance. “I think that a lot of people do not understand what is going on until all of a sudden they are caught up in the system,” said David Doty, who was appointed U.S. district court judge in Minnesota by President Reagan in 1987. “And they find out that people have been mouthing all kinds of slogans, and when the slogans all come down to rest, they sometimes come to rest very hard on the shoulders of the individual.”7
Meanwhile, absurd laws roll on, expedited by less-than-thoughtful lawmakers working within a structure that seems powerless to curb their excesses. In January 2012 Republican Ralph Shortey, a freshman in the Oklahoma Senate, introduced a bill to prevent using fetuses for food.8 Not surprisingly, while this sworn official concerned himself with an extremely unlikely crime, Oklahoma was one of many states reviving the centuries-old tradition of debtors’ prison. Reinstitution of this tradition has helped make a growth industry out of buying up debt for pennies on the dollar and then wrenching a profit out of it.
Although civil judgments aren’t supposed to trigger criminal penalties, judges might grant arrest warrants if debtors fail to show up for court dates or make court-ordered payments. In many cases, the court order for payment didn’t reach the person. Still, more than one-third of states allow people to be arrested for these debts. The Wall Street Journal, attempting to determine how pervasive the practice was, couldn’t come up with a broad estimate. Too many courts don’t keep track. It was also impossible to determine how many such warrants result in arrests, but many do. Often motorists pulled over on a traffic charge learn they’re wanted on debt warrants and are carted off to jail.9
In 2010 officials in McKintosh County, Oklahoma, near Tulsa, issued about fifteen hundred debt-related arrest warrants, up from eight hundred a year before. The Journal talked to many judges and consumer attorneys who said the number of such warrants had surged with the financial crisis. Maricopa County, Arizona, issued 260; Salt Lake City, Utah, 950. The Journal found a debtor in Carbondale, Illinois, who spent five days in jail in March 2010 after failing to pay a $275 debt to a payday lender. These payday creditors have in some states managed to hike their annual rates to 360 percent (not a misprint) without running afoul of usury laws. In January 2011 a judge sentenced a Kenney, Illinois, man to “indefinite incarceration” until he paid $300 on a debt to a lumberyard.10