The Secret Lives of Judges (corrected and updated)

 Posted on November 02, 2011 in Uncategorized

Disturbing video of Aransas County, Texas Judge William Adams abusing his teenage daughter.

After watching some of that (I couldn't watch the whole thing), you may be happy to learn that the statute of limitations on felony injury to a child runs until ten years after the child turns 18. [I had it in my head that the child was 14 at the time of the assault. She was 16, which means that this incident was not injury to a child. It may have been an assault, an aggravated assault, or an injury to a disabled person, each of which has a limitations period of less than seven years. I hesitate to point this out because-just watch-the Texas Legislature will now extend the limitations period for all assaults, or lower the age at which someone is still considered a child for purposes of the injury-to-a-child statute, or otherwise do something to put more people into prison.]

This was not the first time Adams abused his child. If there were evidence that it had happened before she was fourteen years old, he would still be indictable. Aransas County District Attorney Patrick Flanigan could summon mother and child before a grand jury, and ask them about similar incidents before the child's fifteenth birthday. If there were (it's possible that their were not-Adams might simply be a frustrated pedophile who started beating his child when she became physically attractive to him), Adams could be indicted, and the state could argue for the admission of the unindicted assault videotape under Rule 404(b).

Makes you wonder what secrets the judges you appear before are keeping, no? I can imagine one or two of our local criminal-court tyrants getting off on exercising the sort of control over their children that they exercise over the humans forced to appear before them, and becoming enraged when the children don't immediately submit.