Wednesday, July 4, 2007

Criminal Profiling Topic of the Day: When Judges have Impaired Judgment

Over in Sheboygan, Wisconsin is another judge (the newpaper did not bother to name him) who needs to find employment in the fast food industry. He gave a couple of brothers bail , David Goetsch, 52, and Thomas Goetsch, 51– they are free on $75,000 cash bonds – who have plead no contest to two counts of felony stalking and three counts of felony threat to injure. These men, who the judge deemed no danger to the community, have spent nearly a year stalking a real estate agent and threatening to kill her. We don’t have to take just her word for it: she has more than fifty handwritten letters as proof. The letters describe her movements and activities, describe her in a crude sexually explicit manner, include pornographic images, and threaten to kill her. The brothers also stalked her sister and sent letters to five of her clients threatening to burn their homes down or kill them if they didn’t get a different real estate agent.

The judge feels these two are not a threat to the community, this woman, her sister, or her clients. I guess his argument would be that they have been threatening her for almost a year and still haven’t killed anyone. Thanks, Judge, I am sure we all feel comforted by that fact. I guess now that the brothers are facing twelve years in prison, they wouldn’t consider adding to their sentences or retaliating against this poor woman for turning them in.

Judges should be so sure of releasing these creeps into the community that they are willing to be charged with aiding and abetting any crime they commit once they are handed their one-more-opportunity-before-jail pass. Unfortunately, our country doesn’t even seem to have any methodology for citizens to get rid of these judges. They seem to stay on the bench no matter how egregious their actions might be. It is time we change this tenure for life problem with our judiciary instead of just shaking our heads about it.


Criminal Profiler Pat Brown

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I am so hot about this subject. All 50 states have stalking laws, but no one wants to use them. I get the problems with understaffing and jail overcrowding, but that's no excuse, because if things are that bad, it's time for the people involved to shout out the situation to the press and exert enough pressure to get it fixed. Instead they try to keep it as quiet as possible.

In my town a couple of weeks ago, a woman who had called police 10 times in the past month because her ex was stalking her was, not surprisingly murdered. He had defied an RO, and the last I heard he was still nothing more than "a person of interest." I wrote the DA and haven't gotten any response. I had written him when he first got elected (he was a defense atty before, never a prosecutor) to ask him what his stance was on stalking, and he didn't answer then either. At bottom, it is a colossal disrespect and devaluation of women that stalkers continue to be treated as minor criminals.