‘Ideal Spokesman’ for Sex Offenders Ideal Candidate for Sex Offender Registries
Galen Baughman, delivering a Tedx talk titled 'Are We All Sex Offenders?'
Over the weekend, I happened across a piece at Slate about a guy on a sex-offender registry who has been pitched as the “ideal spokesman” for sex offenders looking to get off of onerous lists that makes them community pariahs. As someone who frequents libertarian weblogs, I often hear horror stories about these registries—the 18-year-old who sleeps with the 17-year-old and winds up on a sex offender registry for life, that sort of thing—so I was curious to see what this Galen Baughman had done. Turns out that he, uh, wasn’t exactly a borderline case:
“When I was 19, I went to prison for what was supposed to be 6½ years for having a consensual relationship with a high-school–age kid,” he said. “He was 14½. He was someone I’d known for a while and was really close to.”
As a friend noted on Twitter, when a grown man starts tossing around half-years when discussing the age of the boy he was abusing, he’s lying to himself. Baughman has run into more trouble because his probation officer suspected him of being in contact with a minor despite being under court order not to. (Spoiler: He was!) But this “ideal spokesman” has a rather long history of illegal behavior:
It also leaves out information that has been reported in newspaper stories about his arrest and conviction—most importantly, that Baughman pleaded guilty to multiple crimes, not just one, and that his offenses involved more than one victim. According to a Washington Post story from May 2003, Baughman was accused of sending sexually explicit electronic messages to a 14-year-old in Westchester County, New York. A Virginia newspaper reported that he was separately arrested on suspicion of having sexual contact with juveniles in Arlington, Virginia. In the end, Baughman was convicted of charges involving three victims: carnal knowledge of a minor, promoting sexual performance by a child, and aggravated sexual battery. (The last of these was related to an incident involving a 9-year-old that took place when Baughman was 14.)
So here’s a guy who has repeatedly engaged in illicit behavior with much younger boys, was caught communicating suggestively with another minor while on probation, and whose own friends and allies suspected him of trying to kindle a relationship with another set of underage boys:
Gravens never witnessed any behavior that he believed was illegal. But an alarm went off in his head when he noticed that Baughman seemed to be going out of his way to spend time with a pair of teenagers. One night, he says, he brought up the issue with Baughman. “I confronted him pretty aggressively and said that he couldn’t do it—that he needed to immediately stop,” Gravens says.
Look, I’m open to the idea that these registries are over-subscribed. Josh Gravens, the guy who tried to get Baughman to stop, is more sympathetic, in that he’s on a sex-offender registry for having inappropriately touched his eight-year-old sister when he himself was 12. Not sure that it makes sense to have someone listed as a sex offender for the rest of their life for an impropriety committed at age 12.
But Galen Baughman, a guy who was being pushed as a spokesman for reform, seems like exactlythe sort of person who probably deserves to be on some sort of sex-offender registry! If I found out my son was texting with that creep I’d like to have some idea of his history. A sex offender registry isn’t a punishment; it’s a tool for parents to protect their children. Maybe we need to reform such registries. But it seems to me that, at least in the case of Galen Baughman, they’re working quite nicely.
Hat tip Washington Free Beacon
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