“Last Minute”

This video centers on Ken Hodges’ botched . . . → Read More: The Knockout Blow?]]> Last Thursday Rob Teilhet released an ad in the Democratic race for the Attorney General nomination that could well be a knockout blow if it gets enough airplay – though I have yet to hear about the size or location of the TV buy for it.

This video centers on Ken Hodges’ botched prosecution of the cop who killed a black man in Columbus during a traffic stop where the man was already restrained on the ground. The officer fired two shots into the man’s head, and the video shows the dashcam footage from the cop’s car with the victim’s mother clearly near tears doing narration. Some places have already called this the most powerful campaign commercial of the season, and they could well be right.

Of course, many of us in Albany know Ken for his corruption in regards to the Pheobe Factoids case or the multiple prosecutions many feel he has botched in Albany, including at least one other case where he let another slam dunk murder case get away.

Here’s the full video, courtesy of the event’s host, the Fulton County Daily Report.

Note: I have NOT yet watched this full video yet, only a few seconds of . . . → Read More: Attorney General Debate This Past Monday]]> All four candidates were there, including Albany’s Big Mistake Ken Hodges, former Cobb County Commission Chairman Sam Olens, State Representative Rob Teilhet, and Max Wood.

Here’s the full video, courtesy of the event’s host, the Fulton County Daily Report.

Note: I have NOT yet watched this full video yet, only a few seconds of the introduction.

The scandal among the House Republican leadership that unfolded at the state capitol over the last several weeks has crystallized a mandate for the 2010 Georgia General Assembly.

We must pass sweeping ethics reform during the 2010 . . . → Read More: Mandate for 2010 Legislature: Sweeping Ethics Reform]]> The following is written by Rob Teilhet, a Democratic Candidate for Attorney General, about his ethics proposal.

The scandal among the House Republican leadership that unfolded at the state capitol over the last several weeks has crystallized a mandate for the 2010 Georgia General Assembly.

We must pass sweeping ethics reform during the 2010 legislative session, and restore the public’s trust in state government.

Currently the legislature polices itself on ethics charges. Allowing this is like letting a criminal preside over his own court hearing. The resignation of Speaker Richardson and election of new officers to the majority party are not enough. We must address the underlying culture of corruption that allowed self-dealing and conflicts of interest to run rampant at our state house.

Georgia needs an Attorney General who will make restoring the public’s trust in government a top priority. When citizens think their elected officials are ripping them off, and stealing, and acting for all the wrong reasons, they will never trust government to do the things that are hard and complicated that we have to do together. If people think the government is full of crooks, why on earth would they trust them with health care, or water or transportation?

Sadly, as I write this op ed, public officials are meeting in secret across Georgia. Regular citizens have not been invited to this meeting. In these secret meetings public policies are being planed. These policies are designed not to advance the public interest, but instead the public officials’ own private financial interests, or those of their special interest contributors.

That’s why I will sponsor legislation in January to overhaul Georgia’s conflict of interest laws for the General Assembly. My bill will place the enforcement responsibility for conflict of interest complaints with the State Ethics Commission, rather than the legislature.

If my proposal sounds familiar, it should. It was a centerpiece of Governor Sonny Perdue’s ethics proposals in 2005. Eventually an ethics bill passed in the waning hours of the 2005 session, but the conflict of interest provisions were removed at the insistence of the Georgia House Republican leadership.

Governor Perdue was right in 2005. But his legislation was gutted, and the result was an ethics bill with no teeth on conflict of interest. The conflict of interest scandal we’ve endured over the last several weeks is a direct result of the lack of any meaningful action by the General Assembly on ethics.

I believe Georgia needs stronger ethics laws and a government as good and honest as its people. It is high time we strengthen Georgia’s ethics laws and get our public officials back to the business of serving constituents, rather than themselves.

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Rob Teilhet (pronounced tuh-lay) is a candidate for Attorney Genera in Georgia. He has represented Smyrna and Marietta in the Georgia House of Representatives since his election in 2002 at the age of 28. He is the Chief Deputy Whip of the House Democratic Caucus and serves on the Judiciary, Education, and Industrial Relations Committees. He is a partner in the Marietta law firm of Rogers, Strimban & Teilhet. More information about his campaign can be found at his website, www.robforgeorgia.com.

I said then . . . → Read More: Closing the Consent “Loophole”]]> Last Friday, I wrote about State Rep (and Attorney General Candidate) Rob Teilhet saying he wanted to close the loophole in regards to teachers having sex with students being able to use the fact that it was consensual as a defense when charged with sexual assault of a person in custody.

I said then and I maintain that I have ZERO problems with the teacher in question losing their license to teach. I’m even willing to allow – though I’m not completely sold on this – that it should be a crime to begin with. ALL I am saying is that if a person is charged with sexual assault under this statute, the fact that the sex was consensual SHOULD be a valid defense that SHOULD be allowed at trial – as the Supreme Court of Georgia said last summer.

I just wanted to get my position on the matter crystal clear before going into the meat of this post. You see, there is already a bill that attempts to close this “loophole” – State Rep Kevin Levitas’ HB 886 pre-file.

Also please remember that, as always, this commentary is SIMPLY opinion-based commentary from a “civilian” with absolutely no legal training whatsoever. If you need legal advise on the subject matter at hand, PLEASE contact a member of the State Bar of Georgia!

With HB 886, the classifications of people who can be charged with sexual assault of a person in custody is dramatically enhanced – but not as dramatically as one might think upon first glance.

Under current law, a person who is a “probation or parole officer or other custodian or supervisor of another person” commits sexual assault against another person when said other person is “a probationer or parolee under the supervision of said probation or parole officer or who is in the custody of law or who is enrolled in a school or who is detained in or is a patient in a hospital or other institution”. In the other section – where even under current law, consent is NOT a defense of the crime, the victim must be “in the custody of law” or “detained in or is a patient in a hospital or other institution” or the perpetrator must be “an actual or purported practitioner of psychotherapy” who knows or should have known that the victim was a patient.

In other words, under current law ANY probation or parole officer who engages in sexual contact with ANY prisoner can be charged here, as can ANY teacher who has sexual contact with ANY student, and ANY “custodian or supervisor”-type person in a hospital who has sexual contact with ANY patient. That is a key thing to note, because it actually changes under HB 886.

HB 886 adds in several classes of people – employees, agents, or volunteers – of K-12 schools, probation or parole offices, law enforcement agencies, and hospitals into the classifications of people who can be charged under this law- in addition to “actual or purported practitioner[s] of psychotherapy”. It even uses the language from the current law regarding pyschotherapists regarding “knows or should have known” that the victim was in a subordinate position.

HOWEVER, whereas current law prohibits a teacher at Albany High School from having sex with a student from Dalton High School (just as an example), HB 886 says that the victim must be under the care of the institution the perpetrator is associated with. In other words, the teacher at Albany High could have sex with the student from Dalton High without criminal penalty. Similarly, a doctor at Palmyra could have sex with a patient from Grady Hospital without criminal penalty.

That said, while HB 886 loosens the law a bit, it also tightens it even moreso – by removing the consent defense for EVERYONE still under this law. In other words, if a teacher at Crisp High has consensual sex with a student at Crisp High, that teacher can NOT use the fact that the sex was consensual as a defense under this law – and thus, the consent “loophole” is closed.

So I guess the question becomes: Is this a fair trade-off and compromise? It would no longer be a crime to have sex with a student who is not a student at your school, but if the person you have sex with IS a student at your school, you can no longer use consent as a valid defense.

While initially I was outraged that consent would be removed as a defense, working through this post and looking at the bill and thinking about it, I actually think that this is a decent compromise.

But hey, I’m just one man. What do y’all think?

The article addressed . . . → Read More: Do Teachers Not Deserve Equal Protection Under the Law?]]> This past Sunday, the Marietta Daily Journal had an article about a Supreme Court decision that came down over the summer than I’ve already written about a couple of times – the decision that said that consent WAS a defense for teachers accused of sexual assault of a person in custody.

The article addressed both a local case up there potentially impacted by the decision as well as two State Representatives’ efforts to change the law – one of whom is Rob Teilhet, who is running for the Democratic Party’s nomination for Attorney General.

Per the article,

Teachers across Georgia may legally engage in sexual relationships with students 16 or older if the sex is consensual.

That is what the state Supreme Court held last summer when it ruled, 5-2, in Chase v. The State, a case out of Richmond County. The decision has immediate effects in Cobb County, where at least two former high school teachers are charged with sexual assaults of students older than 16.

At issue is Georgia law 16-6-5.1, which defines sexual assault against persons in custody.

The statute has three subsections, and while one part of the law prohibits a “supervisor of another person” from having sexual contact with a person enrolled in a school, a different section, which addresses sexual contact between a supervisor and someone in legal custody or detained in an institution or hospital, includes this caveat: “Consent of the victim shall not be a defense to a prosecution under this subsection.”

The court’s majority found that the General Assembly, in writing the law, had not added that caveat to the other sections of the law, meaning they had not removed consent as a defense for those sections. In Georgia, the age of consent is 16.

A lawmaker from Gainesville has already drafted legislation for the 2010 session to crystallize the illegality. And a Cobb lawmaker, Rep. Rob Teilhet, says if that bill can’t be passed quickly, “I don’t know what we’ll do this year of any value.”
…
Although it will be up to juries to decide whether either man committed a crime, the state board that deals with educators’ ethics has already acted by revoking both men’s teaching certificates.

Kelly Henson, executive secretary of the Professional Standards Commission, said, “Consent has no bearing on the fact that we consider it completely and totally unethical. Educators who have sexual relations with students can be certain that we will take a severe sanction against their certificate.”
…
Teilhet, a Smyrna Democrat, also disputed the idea of consent in such cases.

“I’ve heard some people suggest that some cases of statutory rape or abuses of power like this are somehow victimless if there is consent. I think that’s flat wrong,” Teilhet said.

“The whole premise behind consent not being a defense … is that the victim is not in a position to resist, and is very vulnerable to be taken advantage of,” Teilhet said. “A 16-year-old who is taken advantage of by an adult suffers long-term consequences as a result. I don’t care if the victim consented or not. The older person has a higher responsibility. Consent isn’t good enough.”

Teilhet is the father of twin girls, and is seeking his party’s nomination for state Attorney General in 2010.

Meanwhile his colleague, state Rep. Doug Collins, a Gainesville Republican, is already working to rewrite the law. Within days of the Chase decision, he had new legislation drafted that would remove consent as a defense when a teacher or someone who works in a school is charged with having sex with a student enrolled in high school.

“The Supreme Court highlighted a problem with the law, and I want to correct that,” said Collins, who was first elected to the legislature in 2006. He is also an Air Force chaplain, assigned to the 94th Airlift Wing at Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Marietta.

“I don’t anticipate a great deal of opposition. I’m an attorney, and I do some criminal defense work,” said Collins, 43, who is himself the father of teenagers. “I just want to address what I consider a very narrow issue. I don’t think anybody would’ve expected that a teacher could get away with having sex with a student and it not be illegal. It’s a narrow window that needs to be closed.”

I’d like to make a few points, and as I do remember that we are talking about people of legal age to give consent in all cases who did, in fact, give such consent.

First, I can completely agree with the General Assembly in regards to the jailers and psychotherapists. With those professions, you are genuinely working with people you can easily manipulate with relative impunity, and those laws SHOULD therefore be more stringent.

That said, teachers should NOT fall under similar guidelines. Quite simply, a high school teacher MIGHT see a student for an hour and a half per day in class. In that hour and a half, teacher almost never have any one on one time at all with any student, particularly not in the environment of trying to help them with their mental illnesses.

Teilhet seems to think that 16-18 year old students are “not in a position to resist”. Clearly, he hasn’t been in a high school classroom in several years. Most of my students resisted when I told them to do their classwork! Yet Teilhet thinks that they would not resist an unwelcome advance from a teacher.

If “consent isn’t good enough” for under 18, why is it good enough for over 18? And if it isn’t good enough under 18, why is the legal age of consent 16? Should he not be attacking THAT law, rather than banning teachers from using consent as a defense to a charge of sexual assault of a person in custody?

I completely agree that teachers SHOULD NOT have intimate relationships with students. The whole reason I left that bit about the Professional Standards Committee in the blockquote was because I do not mind if a teacher loses their license to teach because of a sexual relationship with a student. That has long been a part of our ethical standards, and teachers know the risk when they make that decision.

All I’m saying is that IF they are caught having sex with a student and are charged under this statute, the fact that it was consensual sex SHOULD be a valid defense under the law for teachers, exactly the same as it is with virtually every other person out there charged with a similar crime.

After all, do teachers not deserve equal protection under the law?

Tom Knox has indeed filed to run for State Insurance Commissioner, as I reported would happen more than a month ago. I didn’t get any . . . → Read More: Assorted Campaign Updates]]> I’ve gotten a few campaign updates over the past week that I really haven’t had time to do a detailed post on, so here’s a shotgun-style update on them:

Tom Knox has indeed filed to run for State Insurance Commissioner, as I reported would happen more than a month ago. I didn’t get any campaign emails, and I don’t know if he has a website or any other contact information (facebook, twitter, email, heck, even a phone number) available. No quick Google search turns up any site, but in related news the post where I first reported this would happen is the second result in Google on a search of ‘Tom Knox insurance’. Pretty cool!

Speaking of the Insurance Commissioner race, Mary Squires’ campaign found that post and emailed me earlier this week this link to a press release they issued late last week with a list of legislative endorsements. Just from a quick glance, it appears that all named are Democrats – which is reasonable, since she is a Democrat. Two SWGA area names are on that list – State Rep Gerald Greene (D-Cuthbert) and State Senator Freddie Sims (D-Albany). Probably the most politically significant name on the list is State Sen Emmanuel Jones (D-Savannah), the head of the Legislative Black Caucus.

Moving into the Attorney General race, Rob Teilhet also picked up Jones’ endorsement earlier this week. Also making the news in that particular race is that Erick Erickson’s friend, Max Wood, has filed to challenge current Cobb County Commission Chairman Sam Olens in the GOP primary for that job. Erick’s endorsement will either be a stroke of genius for him or his death warrant, only time will tell which. Speaking of Olens, PeachPundit reported earlier today that a former US Attorney, Joe D. Whitley, has now endorsed Olens.

Moving into another race, I am hearing via Facebook that Roger Hines has announced that he will be jumping into the GOP primary for State School Superintendent with current officeholder Kathy Cox and SWGA’s Richard Woods.

Speaking of Mr. Woods, don’t forget that I am interviewing both him and Brian Westlake this weekend, and I’d like your input on some questions to ask both of them.

Finally, Kyle Constable has the story of John Oxendine proclaiming to take the 912Candidates Group pledge and receiving an endorsement from them. The problem, according to Kyle, is that Glenn Beck‘s official The 912 Project doesn’t do endorsements, this is a fringe group not affiliated with the official program, and Ox is trying to pass it off as an official endorsement.