Heimlich’s offense was serious. So was his punishment given that he was underage. He got two years’ probation, with the threat of 40 weeks in detention if he didn’t comply. And he was mandated into sex offender treatment and placed on the sex offender registry.

Oregonian columnist John Canzano called on Heimlich to pull himself out of the team’s College World Series appearance and suggested that his baseball life should be over. (Heimlich has since quit the team, though he might have noted that that Canzano has been about as consistent as the Washington Nationals bullpen when it comes to second chances.) Other commentators piled on. A CBS Sports analyst called Heimlich’s background “sordid” and said felons should never be allowed in college athletics. Eugene Register-Guard columnist Austin Meek blasted the school for signing Heimlich in the first place.

All of them argued that the larger context–Heimlich’s crime–wipes out his right to play baseball.

But every context has its context, as Tony Judt once said. Juveniles and adults convicted of sex crimes have very low re-offense rates. Teens often make bad decisions precisely because they’re still kids—developing brains haven’t formed the powers of judgment that adults have, which is why the juvenile system is designed to rehabilitate, not punish. And a mound of research shows that what keeps ex-offenders on the right track are housing, jobs, and social support—not isolation and public humiliation.

Heimlich went unselected in this week’s Major League draft. His baseball career may be over. The Oregonian’s Heimlich maneuver probably killed it.

The unforgiving rules operating for Heimlich don’t seem to apply to everyone. Take 31-year-old Texas Rangers pitcher Matt Bush. In March 2012, behind the wheel of his SUV while drunk, he hit 72-year-old motorcyclist Anthony Tufano. Then he fled the scene, driving over Tufano’s head in the process. Tufano suffered a brain hemorrhage, a collapsed lung, broken ribs, broken bones in his back. Bush would have killed Tufano had he not been wearing a helmet. It was Bush’s third arrest for a DUI.

Please read the rest of Steven’s posting at Life on the List.

Decades after Dennis Hastert’s alleged sexual abuse of high school wrestlers he coached, the then-Speaker of the House helped pass a tough-on-sex-crimes law known as the Adam Walsh Act.

Now a Florida group that calls that 2006 law “ineffective and unduly harsh,” is asking U.S. District Judge Thomas Durkin to consider “hundreds of thousands” of victims it says the law left in its wake while sentencing Hastert for a related hush-money case.

In a sentencing brief filed last week, federal prosecutors for the first time said Hastert molested at least four boys while he was a high school wrestling coach in the 1970s in a southwest suburb of Chicago. With the statute of limitations long expired for those alleged abuses, prosecutors said six months is the maximum prison sentence facing Hastert for a banking crime at his scheduled April 27 hearing.

Hastert’s work on the Adam Walsh Act was “hypocritical and self-serving,” wrote Gail Colletta, the president of the Florida Action Committee, an organization seeking sex registry reform, in a letter filed by the court Tuesday. She asked the judge to impose a sentence longer than the six-month maximum advised by federal guidelines.

“Hundreds of thousands of individuals and their millions of family members and friends have to live with the draconian punishments he fostered,” Colletta wrote. “These individuals are also the victims of Mr. Hastert’s actions.”

Colletta said there are more than 800,000 people in the United States today on sex offender registries, which the 2006 act bolstered. Many of those registered committed “non-violent, one-time” offenses, she said. Her organization seeks sex offender registry and sentencing reform, particularly for juveniles convicted for consensual acts.

“The Florida Action Committee has members who have or are serving decades in prison for consensual teenage relationships and acts that involved no direct victim contact,” Colletta wrote.

Hastert pleaded guilty in October to a structuring violation related to $1.7 million he withdrew from bank accounts prosecutors say was used to pay off a sex abuse victim.

When the Adam Walsh Act was passed in 2006, Hastert, then the Speaker of the House, released a statement celebrating the passage on the 25th anniversary of the abduction of Adam Walsh, a Florida boy taken at a mall and later found dead. His father, John Walsh, went on to host “America’s Most Wanted.”

“At home, we put the security of our children first and Republicans are doing just that in our nation’s House,” Hastert said at the time. “We’ve all seen the disturbing headlines about sex offenders and crimes against children. These crimes cannot persist.”

In 2003, Hastert advocated for another child sex crimes law known as the Protect Act, which mandated life sentences in prison for repeat child molesters and created the Amber Alert system for missing children.

“It is equally important to stop those predators before they strike, to put repeat child molesters into jail for the rest of their lives and to help law enforcement with the tools they need to get the job done,” Hastert said in a statement in 2003. In a sentencing brief filed last week, Hastert’s Sidley Austin lawyers asked Durkin to forego prison time and impose a probation sentence. The brief said Hastert nearly died from a rare blood stream infection in November, and that he was remorseful, apologizing for “misconduct that occurred many decades ago.”

“By any measure, appearing before this Court to receive its sentence will be the most difficult day in Mr. Hastert’s life,” his lawyer, Sidley partner Thomas Green, wrote.

Source: National Law Journal