Not your typical Sexual Offender

Mac is fascinated by the courtroom to-ings and fro-ings of one Debra Lafave , a middle-school reading teacher who is up on charges of sexual misconduct with one of her students.

Her attorney, sufficiently appalled by a plea deal that would have sent LeFave to a Florida State Prison for a lengthy stretch stated: "To place an attractive young woman in that kind of hell hole is like putting a piece of raw meat in with the lions. I'm not sure she would survive. "

Now, let's turn that around .

Instead of the defendant being a comley young, blonde, woman let's make the defendant a Male, run-of-the-mill pedophile.....say about 25 years old with long stringy hair, abundant tattoos, bad teeth, you get the picture.

And, just for grins let's have his lawyer parade him in front of the TV cameras with the statement that it would be a terrible thing to put such a nice young man in a hell hole such as The Florida State Prison where he would be a piece of raw meat before the lions.

How long do you think it would be before the cameramen fell down in fits of laughter?

But isn't it interesting that under the law both the male and the female defendant are regarded as exactly the same type of sexual offender? Isn't it somehow refreshing that the law makes no distinction between male and female defendants when it comes to matters of illicit/illegal sex? And, upon conviction both of our defendants will bear the scourge of "Sexual Offender" probably to the end of their days.

Somehow or other if Debra showed up on one of those Sheriff's websites listing sexual evildooers living amongst us I'd probably invite her over for tea. Probably not while my teenage sons were about. But, if our other defendant showed up on the same website I'd probably give him a wide berth.

What's strange in all this is that neither Mac nor my wife thought the Fitzgibbons plea was at all out of the ordinary until I pointed out that that wouldn't have been their reaction had it been our aforementioned slease bag.

As my Uncle Mitchell used to say, "it all depeneds on whose ox is being gored."

Arjay Morgan