Consensual high school sex play gets woman 12 years on sex offender list
November 25, 2008From Reason’s Hit & Run, a classic example of the folly of laws that make no exceptions for circumstances:
Wendy Whitaker, 29, has been on Georgia’s sex offender list for more than 12 years. Her crime? She performed oral sex on a high school classmate just after turning 17. The boy was just shy of his 16th birthday. Both were sophomores. Whitaker is now suing, claiming that given her crime, her sex offender status is cruel and unusual punishment.
[snip]
Whitaker is also involved in a second lawsuit—this one to keep her house. In 2006, she and her husband scoped out neighborhood surrounding the Harlem, Georgia home they eventually purchased to be sure they were in compliance with Georgia’s sex offender law at the time. That law prohibited offenders from living within 1,000 feet of any area where children congregate. Despite their efforts, local authorities ordered Whitaker and her husband to vacate shortly after they moved in. They had overlooked a nearby church, which was running an unadvertised daycare service.
Here’s the problem: No one ever got elected to office championing the cause of people who are convicted sex criminals. And as the article points out, it could have been worse. Had she been a 17-year-old black male getting a BJ from a consenting girl a few years younger, a 10-year sentence cold have been in the offing.
Tags: sex offender list, Wendy Whitaker