Attack on Jessica's Law vote in House race amounts to demagoguery

I don't live in Austin's District 47 or know much about either Texas House candidate in the Southwest Travis County race; one-term Democratic Rep. Valinda Bolton wasn't on any of the committees I watch closely in 2007, and while I've had extensive dealings with former Rep. Terry Keel, who previously chaired the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee and is now Tom Craddick's parliamentarian, I don't know a thing about his sister-in-law who's running against Bolton.

However, Donna Keel's cheapshotting Bolton over her vote against Jessica's Law, as reported by Kate Alexander in yesterday's Statesman, reveals either a profound ignorance of the issues by candidate Keel or the cynical mentality of a demagogue. This was a deeply flawed piece of legislation whose centerpiece - the death penalty for child molesters - was promptly deemed unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court. (SCOTUS first declared execution for rape unconstitutional in the '70s, and reaffirmed that conclusion this year.)

Texas' statutes in place before Jessica's Law were by no means lenient. The uncorroborated accusation of a child, even hearsay, already could earn a life sentence in Texas - any tuffer than that is just overkill. It's already hard enough to get familiy members to report these crimes and Jessica's Law foolishly made it more likely victims won't come forward.

Creating a phony wedge issue to use for cheap-shotting critics as "soft on crime" was the only reason the Lege passed this flawed and pointless law. It was a weird bill all the way through the process - even the prosecutors and crime victim groups opposed it along the the ACLU and other usual suspects. The ONLY people who seemed to want the bill were a handful of politicians, and they wanted it badly, while those who didn't like it mostly held their nose and voted for it anyway - either because of pressure from the leadership or because they were afraid somebody might do to them what Keel is trying to do to Bolton.

This is an issue where Texas pols have been grandstanding with "git tuff" bills for so many years that all reasonable penalty increases have long been exhausted. At this point, most new penalty hikes amount to overkill, in this case with unintended, negative consequences for crime victims.

Keel's attack is even more despicable because Bolton "spent her career working with victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse," reports the Statesman. So, like the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault, Bolton opposed the bill because it made things worse for victims - that's an honorable vote, all the more courageous because she knew when she made it some cynical opportunist might use it later for demagoguing in a campaign, just like Donna Keel is doing now.