Our Lieutenant Governor has found a new issue to bolster her campaign for the governor's office. As this article in the Boston Globe reports, Kerry Healey thinks we need specialized courts to handle sex offense cases. We have drug courts in some jurisdictions, and I know of at least one "gun court" in Peabody, which serves Lynn, also. Her argument, as the article reports it, is that we need these courts "to improve how victims are treated and sex offenders are monitored and to drive down the number of new crimes committed by known offenders." The Globe quotes:
"We need to have a court that understands the plight of the victim, that understands how to deal with sex offenders and disposes of these cases appropriately," Healey said.
I am cynical about Kerry Healey, politicians in general, and wealthy Republican candidates especially. Sex crimes are obviously a hot topic in the media. The public's interest in prurience is matched only by the media's efforts to feed it to us. As someone who tries sex offense cases, I do not feel that courts have a problem understanding the "plight of the victim", and I think our courts "deal with sex offenders" just fine, whatever that means. I suspect that "dispos[ing] of these cases appropriately" means finding every defendant guilty and imposing the maximum applicable penalty.
Our judges are, for the most part, quite bright, and, also for the most part, do not have a hard time understanding and following the issues in a sex offense case. It may sound callous, but I'm not sure how the "plight of the victim" figures into the determination of guilt or non-guilt of the defendant, which is what the courts do. And I certainly don't think Kerry Healey is in a position to tell us if sex offense cases are being "disposed of properly." She hasn't identified any specific systemic problems in those areas, though I am sure she has an anecdote or two to horrify us with.
The real problem is that there just aren't enough judges, courtrooms, or other resources available to deal with any type of case. When I see courts in other states that have, for example, real-time transcription, I am reminded that, while our courts in Massachusetts are the oldest in the hemisphere, they are still operated much as they were for most of the last century. But fixing that problem is not of interest to Healey, or any other politician, because it would cost a great deal of money, and she would not get to use phrases like "sex offender" or "plight of the victim" on the steps of Boston Municipal Court in front of the press. And it isn't politically viable to suggest that we should spend the public treasure on anything that may benefit a defendant as well as a prosecutor. It just wouldn't play as well with the voters who vote the way the talk shows instruct them to.
