That Time Roy Moore Refused to Convict a Child Molester Who Abused a 4-Year-Old

[emmett grogan]

The Alabama Republican has made no secret of his views on sexual assault.
By Liz Posner / AlterNet
November 14, 2017, 9:07 AM GMT


Roy Moore has had a month or so to forget. Last week, the Washington Post broke the news that he sexually pursued a 14-year-old girl back when he was in his 30s. Since then, a total of five women have accused the Alabama senatorial candidate of harassment and abuse.

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In 2015 when Moore was chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, he and eight other judges heard the case of Eric Lemont Higdon, a 17-year-old childcare worker accused of raping a four-year-old boy in his care. A local court convicted Higdon on two counts of sodomy, one for statutory rape and another for forcible rape. An appeals court later overturned the forcible rape charge, and the case eventually reached the state Supreme Court.

Eight of the justices in Montgomery ruled that the appeals court had erred and voted to leave the two convictions as originally ruled. The one judge who dissented? Roy Moore.

Alabama’s archaic definition of “forcible rape” requires that the victim fear for his or her life or suffer severe injury, and Moore, a strict constructionist in the tradition of Antonin Scalia, saw no evidence of this in the Higdon case. He wrote, “because there was no evidence in this case of an implied threat of serious physical injury…or of an implied threat of death, Higdon cannot be convicted of sodomy in the first degree ‘by forcible compulsion.’”

<snip>

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/time-roy-moore-refused-convict-child-molester-who-abused-4-year-old

So thats going to be his defense: none of his victims had fear for life or safety.

There's got to be a place in hell.

[nykym]

1. His place in hell will be

a room with a hard wooden chair no other furnishings except for an old tube tv that will play all of his denials 24/7/ for eternity.

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

4. That would be WAYYY too good for that fuck!!

[smirkymonkey]

2. How the FUCK can the rape of a 4 year old child NOT be considered "forcible rape"?!

FFS! How did that disgusting pig know what that poor child was feeling and what kind of damage it would do to him in the future? God, this is just so incredibly sick. As far as he is concerned, children and teenagers have no rights whatsoever. They are there to be used as objects to satisfy the lust of old, perverted men.

[emmett grogan]

3. Presumably so would rape of the mentally ill, those in coma, the drugged, the alcohol impaired .....

anything one can get away with. Age and being white has its privileges.