Whither Jessica’s Law? In our earlier post from this week, we noted the evisceration of that California statutory enactment by state corrections officials acting in the wake of a state court decision rendered earlier this year. The result: An estimated 4,200 — if not more — sex offenders convicted of crimes against children previously who…
“Kids in kindergarten living across the street from a sex offender is not what the people voted for in Jessica’s Law.” So says a state legislator who is clearly dismayed by an abrupt turn in established state policy that has removed living restrictions on thousands of paroled sex offenders across California. As noted in a…
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles has duly reflected. And with the “further reflection” recently noted by an attorney representing the archdiocese, that church body has withdrawn the earlier support it had extended to the Los Angeles Unified School District in a sexual abuse case involving a former teacher and a 14-year-old female student.…
Actually, the above headline might reasonably benefit from a slight word adjustment, namely, the substitution of “many” for “some,” given relevant statistics that help flesh out the real-world dimensions of driver-related risks in the nation’s commercial trucking industry. In the aggregate, commercial truckers would seem by all indications to warrant close scrutiny from safety regulators…
As published by LA Times, BuzzFeed, Inside Edition, KTLA, ABC 7 and NBC, on October 22, 2015, Dr. Joseph Koetters, a former Marlborough School teacher pled guilty to four felony counts of sexual assault of two minors who were also former students. Mr. Koetters sexually molested both students while they attended Marlborough in the early…
It’s every parent’s nightmare: discovering that a teacher, coach, pastor or other trusted adult has preyed on your teen. Yet it happens far too often. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 93 percent of juvenile sexual assault cases involve perpetrators who know the victim in some capacity. After hearing about another inexcusable instance…
One sentence in a recent media article refers to “unfettered access to young people.” That can assuredly be a good thing where, say, an impassioned teacher is searching for new talent to challenge and mold. In instances where clergy members are intent on committing acts of sexual abuse, though, it is obviously a disaster. We…
How uncomfortable are college students who have been sexually abused on campus — most often by another student — with reporting details of that violence to campus or law enforcement officials, much less mentioning its occurrence at all? Put another way: How comfortable — that is, how confident — might some sexual abusers in a…
At some level, a good many of our readers across Los Angeles County and elsewhere in California likely worry a bit about nursing homes, when they think about them. Perhaps some of them have a loved one in a nursing facility and wonder about staff sufficiency, care delivery, food quality, medication dispensing and related factors.…
California is a vanguard state for taking the lead on many matters of national importance. Today (and in our immediately following blog post of this week), we take a look at one such matter that is unquestionably significant across the country and most assuredly in need of a broadly purposeful response from authoritative figures and…