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Hi everybody, this is Terry O'Malley, I'm glad to be here with you today on our
website, and wanted to talk a little bit today about *** offenses, and how
they're different from most other cases.
Typically when somebody is charged with any kind of a *** offense, the police
will find it necessary to take you into custody.
They'll do that so that you have to post a bond in order to get out of jail.
They like to do that because they're able to take your fingerprints
and photograph, and have a record in what they consider a more serious case.
These types of cases are especially difficult for me because
one of the mind sets of a presumption of guilt that exist with the court system I
think is incorrect, and I don't think it should be there constitutionally.
But, that's what happens with judges in cases like this. Judges and police. They
all assume
that you're guilty of a crime before you've been proven guilty.
one of the ways this works itself out
is that they require you to be away from children once you've been
arrested or accused of a crime.
Being away from kids might mean you that you can't go back to your house. Or, if you work
with kids at your job, you can't go back to your job.
And that's difficult. It seems unfair to me that that happens, but it does.
There's some things we can do to minimize that within the
court system by asking the court for permission
as a condition of your bond that you might be able to have supervised
contact with your kids, or maybe kids in a professional setting.
One of the other ways that they
exercise this presumption of guilt in a case like this, is they require you to
have some kind of a GPS monitoring device attached your ankle. I
don't think that's appropriate in a case where you haven't been found guilty yet,
yet that that's one of things that courts do
in order to reduce their risk.
There a lot of calculated risks that the court is willing to take if we can offer
them a certain level of safety for their careers.
Judges are like anybody else and they're concerned about their careers,
and they don't want people who are accused of the sex offense having
full contact with kids anymore. They want to start to tighten up the network of
where you are, who you're having contact with. One of the ways they do that
is with the GPS monitoring,
by limiting your ability to have contact with kids (even if they're your
own kids), and so
I think it's unfair for them to do that, but that's what happens. We are
able to work with judges and district attorneys to reduce that risk level,
to show them
that there is not that great of a risk in your case.
And what they'll do is sometimes
make accommodations for us so that we can keep you at your job, or maybe
keep you having contact with your own kids.