In Alabama, the process of creating a jury is in progress for a former judge named Herman Thomas, who is being put on trial due to accusations of kidnapping, sexual abuse, extortion (which is obtaining money or property by threat to a victim's property or loved ones, intimidation, or false claim of a right) and sodomy (which is anal copulation by a man inserting his penis in the anus either of another man or a woman). “He is accused of checking male inmates out of jail and forcing them to engage in sexual activity.” Mobile County District Attorney John Tyson has said that a jury may be seated by Thursday but Thursday was the seventh and today is already the eight so the case probably has been pushed off for the last few days of the week.
In March, an indictment, which is a charge of a felony, returned with fifty seven counts against Thomas, than a second charge in August that added more counts. The article states that at some point Thomas had about one hundred and five counts but the judge threw some of them out because the statute of limitations, which is a law that sets the maximum period which one can wait before filing a lawsuit, depending on the type of case or claim, had expired. Also during this week, charges dealing with one of the fifteen victims were dropped. This brought up an interesting controversy because that victim had filed a lawsuit against an attorney who represented him in a different case, so the prosecutors were questioned if that had any impact on their decision to drop him as a victim, and they simply denied stating that it was an effort to simplify the trial.
In a scramble of defense, a racial statement was also made regarding Thomas by his defense attorney Robert Clark, stating that Thomas was the only black circuit judge that Mobile County has ever had, and that the right-wing Republicans have purposely gotten rid of him. Personally I believe if there were a small number of counts against Thomas, with a limited amount of victims, then that may have been a possibility. But when there are eighty counts, not including all of the ones that have been dropped, with fourteen victims, then the odds are very against Thomas, and a racial issue seems beside the point. He has also been previously accused of ethical violations, which were dropped after his resignation in October of 2007, which means that this is not the first time he has been targeted.
The best supportive evidence the article provides against Thomas is another newspapers report of a semen stain of one of the victims found by a forensics team on the carpeting of a storage room at Mobiles Government Plaza that belonged to Thomas. The same exact room that other defendants have alleged to being mistreated in.
I would never doubt that things like this occur, especially when dealing with somebody of great authority. I mean if somebody is being put on trial where if charged guilty is going to face ten years in jail, and the deciding judge threatens him with up to twenty years unless he has sex with him, then I’m sure that there are a group of people who would avoid ten extra years and do as told. It is sick to think that things like that happen, especially considering that the man has a wife and a few daughters, whose lives are going to be dramatically affected. But that’s reality and this can be looked at as a simple example of why it is beneficial to have power split up rather than given to one leading authority. Most importantly the one lesson we men can all learn from this is that if you are in Mobile County, Alabama, at all costs avoid being arrested because you do not want to enter the storage room of Mobile’s Government Plaza.
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