Standing up for justice and diversity
Galen Baughman is a star, a master of stand-up. Not stand-up comedy, although he is surely smart enough for that, but stand-up persuasion. Telling a personal story with modest, dignified eloquence, this presentable 32-year-old weaves a narrative that artfully compels the sympathies of a mainstream audience who might be expected to loathe him, for he is speaking as a so-called "sex offender".
He stands, alone in the spotlight, for a TEDx talk delivered late last year to college students in New York about his nine-year imprisonment for sex with a willing 14-year-old boy, and his close brush with indefinite incarceration under civil confinement as a "sexually violent predator". His presentation was released on YouTube [www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYt-3fai-PI] on 26 January. [...]
Galen was still a teenager himself, a 19-year-old college student, when he fell into the clutches of the law. He had been at the University of Indiana, studying at the university's prestigious Jacobs School of Music to become an opera singer. He was sentenced in a Virginia court in 2004 to 30 years in prison for sex with a minor after having been charged initially with soliciting sex over the internet. The younger teen was a "sexually mature" adolescent, willingly involved. The boy did not want to prosecute, but his parents did. [...]
Part of Galen's long sentence had originally been suspended by the judge, meaning that after six and a half years he was due to be released. But the authorities told him they thought he might be too dangerous to let go. In 2007 he was informed he might qualify for civil commitment. [...] Galen took his case to a jury trial in a Virginia court. Even though the judge refused to allow evidence from Galen's own medical expert, a jury of six women and one man decided he was not likely to be a "sexually violent predator", thereby removing the rationale for holding him indefinitely in civil commitment.
He was the first person in Virginia ever to win such a civil commitment jury trial, and one of only a few nationally. He was released on probation, and subject to a state policy based on a "containment model" involving polygraphs and therapy sessions with a great deal of intrusive non-confidential questioning (anything said to a therapist could end up on a prosecutor's desk) about sexual behaviour, including masturbation.
source: Article 'Standing up for justice and diversity' by Tom O'Carroll; tomocarroll.wordpress.com/2016/02/01/standing-up-for-justice-and-diversity/; Heretic TOC; 1 February 2016