If he did the same to 18 girls, it would be considered a sex crime. Highly hypocritical.

If you're going to post such an incendiary bit of news please make sure you supply all the key facts. Omitting that these perverse acts were conducted over the boys' clothing (shorts, underwear,etc) is incredibly irresponsible. Not to say that such information doesn't make the acts less reprehensible (I've already written to the AZ county's DA to express my concern) or preclude them from being deemed sexual assaults, but it does change the context of the story in an important way. I look to Mother Jones to supply me with the truth I can't get other places. Please don't make me look elsewhere.

Neither of my sources included that piece of information (perhaps they were incredibly irresponsible?), so I didn't know it. Thank you for supplying it.

I fail to see how it makes any difference at all in terms of the crime, but I, too, appreciate accuracy.

I can not help but think of two things. If it was MY son that had done that, I doubt he would be receiving that kind of deal. I also do not see how them having clothes on makes any difference in the crime after all...if you wear protection during a rape it is STILL a rape. If they are guitly of sodomy it makes not a wit of difference if they had clothes on or not.

As a former resident of the community where this took place and knowing both the prosecutor and father of the accused, I can only say justice certainly wasn't served in this case. I guess who you are is more important than what you did. It didn't used to be that way in Prescott ...

How is this Journalism? If you don't check the story and repeat what your sources send you, you might as well just post a link to your source.

Another question is Where did the Sexual part come in? Was this Mother Jones's doing to "Spice Up" the story? The charges were 18 counts of aggravated assault and 18 counts of kidnapping.

It is possible someone could read that Bennett confesed that he and Wheeler sodomized several 11- to 14-year-old boys with broomsticks and flashlights in 40 separate incidents.
Maybe this is where the Sexual part came in.

Obviously they had good attorneys to point out that in order to sodomized they would have to have performed Sodomy.

Webster Definition of Sodomy:

1 : copulation with a member of the same sex or with an animal
2 : noncoital and especially anal or oral copulation with a member of the opposite sex

Which could not have been done through clothes.

That is not the legal definition, or thousands of gay men in America would not have been arrested for sodomy. I assume you are aware of the sodomy laws in most states. (It is also an inadequate dictionary definition, harking back to the days when readers were protected from anything about two men having sex.)

The victims' parents are claiming sexual assault, and rightly so. Speaking first as a person with common sense and second as someone who has worked in the field of sex abuse and assault for 19 years, I can assure you this was a sexual assault. As Andrew Vachhs says, "Requiring proof of intent in a sexual assault case is a 'red herring'."

Humiliation via making the boys carry signs, or shaving their heads, is not in the same class as performing what is generally known as a sex practice among homosexual men and among many heterosexual couples.

Tragic.

Michael Locker MD

Apparently, more often than not, when there is an opportunity to do so, prosecutors will stretch, bend, or break rules while prosecuting offenders. In fact, since 1970, individual judges and appellate court panels cited prosecutorial misconduct as a factor when dismissing charges, reversing or reducing sentences in approx. 2,000 cases, while in another 500 more cases appellate judges found such misconduct serious enough to merit additional discussion.

Additionally, according to K. Goldwasser, a law professor at Washington U (St. Louis), prosecutorial misconduct often occurs out of sight, "It is not a safe assumption that cases ending with guilty pleas are absent prosecutorial misconduct."

And because some cases remain unpublished, short of visiting every courthouse in the country, there is no way to determine exactly how many cases are dismissed, ect., due to such misconduct.

the problem here is that 1./ it is virtually unheard of for a gov. prosecutor to be disbarred due to such misconduct,and 2./ prosecutors are "protected" by absolute immunity--they cannot be sued for malicious prosecution.

What is going on here that such gov. officials should feel free to commit blatant crime? I would hazard to guess that the thing is that this prosecutorial crime violates only fed. laws, and the feds. are all on the same team, insofar as they have no conscience when it comes to wrongful imprisonment, because: 1./ much money is at stake here (there was an article in the Atlantic Monthly about the big business of prisons), and 2./ crime is a big platform for certain politicians to run on, such the feds. are committed to keeping the crime figures up (I know of a good story about N. Rockefeller and his attempts to use crime and addiction as a political platform--the Attilla the Hun law...).

The URL is for a direct feed to the letter from the Yavapai County Attorney's office.

Regarding the claim that the offenses were committed OVER the victims fully clothed bodies, how *does one manage to sodomize a little boy with broomsticks and flashlights without pulling down their pants?

I submit that it's totally impossible to do so and that the claim that the children remained clothed, is, at the very least, disingenuous.

I don't know all the details of this case, but folks, please be aware it IS possible to penetrate orifices with objects while clothing is on. It just makes it more painful because the cloth is pushed in too.