child predators

Ethics Hero: Judge Chet Tharpe

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments
Same crime, same county: Guess which sexual predator-teacher got the tougher sentence.

Same crime, same county: Guess which sexual predator-teacher got the tougher sentence.

Florida Circuit Judge Chet Tharpe sentenced former Hillsborough County teacher Ethel Anderson to a stunning 38 years in prison this week for performing oral sex and other sex acts on a 12-year-old boy she tutored on weekends. “There are those that believe that nothing’s wrong if the defendant is a woman and the victim is a male,” Tharpe said as he sent the sexual predator to prison. “This court does not recognize gender. If it’s proven, as an adult, that you had sex with a child, you can expect to go to prison.”

This was an ringing and much needed message to send to a county, indeed to a country, that have often seemed confused about how to handle women who rape their underage students using the authority and trust they have as teachers. Especially in Hillsborough County, though, for it was here that ex-teacher Debra Lafave pleaded  guilty in 2005 to having sex with a 14-year-old boy,and was merely sentenced to house arrest by Judge Thorpe’s colleague Judge Wayne Timmerman. Why? Interesting question. LaFave’s lawyer famously argued that his movie star gorgeous client was too attractive to go to jail (recall the recent post here about defense attorneys appealing to bias), and it worked. Continue reading →

The Eventual Firing of Daniel Picca: Why Our Children Are Not Safe In Public School

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Wait…is that a CHILD’S hand?

Today, in a scathing editorial, the Washington Post related the shocking story of the firing of Daniel Picca, a Montgomery County, Maryland  elementary school teacher who was suspected by school officials of having inappropriate relations with male students since at least 1995. This was, said the Post, ” a stinging indictment of a school bureaucracy that for almost two decades believed it had a problem but reacted with a seemingly endless flow of ineffective warnings, letters, reprimands and — most appalling — reassignments of the teacher to other schools and other students.” Montgomery County, it should be noted, boasts of one of the finest public school systems in the nation….or so we have been told.

Picca, as was detailed by a hearing examiner  in 2010 and by an administrative law judge this year, had been warned for 17 years about his conduct with young boys, including inappropriate touching, having students sit on his lap, “wrestling” with the boys and inviting some to an extracurricular “Strong Boys Club” of his own invention, where he encouraged male students to remove their shirts, according to student testimony. In 1995, county child protective services  said that Picca was responsible for “indicated child abuse.”The school system now says it missed this, somehow—not that it didn’t have plenty of evidence already. Continue reading →