Clovis "Chuckie" Claxton, 38, committed suicide last month in Ocala, Fla., after some self-righteous asswipe (or asswipes) posted fliers with Claxton's picture on it and the words "CHILD RAPIST" all over Claxton's neighborhood. Florida authorities did not consider the 135-pound, wheelchair-bound Claxton, who was mentally slow since childhood, to pose any serious threat to children. Even in death, Claxton is still being punished for having sexually molested (but he did not "rape") a girl 15 years ago, for which he spent more than two years in prison -- this March 2003 photo of Claxton is from his profile that remains on the state of Florida's sex offender Web site even after his suicide.
It's not about the children
Pretty soon we're going to have to form vigilante groups to deal with the growing problem of vigilantes.
First it was the "Minutemen," the rednecks who blame the United States' problems not on the members of the Bush regime, whose main concern has been to make the rich richer and the poor poorer and in so doing to wipe out the middle class, but on the relatively powerless Mexican nationals who cross the United States-Mexico border to do the unpleasant jobs that whitey won't do.
Now, it's this (this is from The Associated Press):
OCALA, Fla. -- For nearly four years, Chuckie Claxton lived anonymously amid the gated horse pastures and moss-draped oaks of the Florida Orange Groves subdivision. Then the crimes of others drew new attention to his own.
In the statewide outrage over the arrests of sex offenders in the separate killings of two young girls, somebody in the Groves went to the state police Web site to see if any sex offenders were living in the neighborhood.
That person -- authorities don't know who -- found an entry about Claxton's molestation of a young girl 15 years ago, printed it out on bright yellow paper and blanketed the neighborhood with dozens of fliers.
The poster didn't mention that the 5-foot-9, 135-pound Claxton relied on a wheelchair, that police no longer considered him a serious threat and that he had no further sex offenses. But the flier's creator saw fit to add something incendiary. At the bottom of the page, in bold block letters, were the words "CHILD RAPIST."
Four days after the fliers appeared, 38-year-old Chuckie Claxton was found dead, an empty bottle of scotch, a bag of pills and one of the posters beside him.
"This pushed him over the edge," his grieving father says.
Florida is a state suddenly preoccupied with the notion of sexual deviates lurking in scary proximity to children. Volusia County is closing school bus stops near the homes of registered offenders. Miami Beach is considering nearly half-mile buffer zones around schools to essentially ban sex offenders from the city. And Monday, Gov. Jeb Bush signed legislation allowing lifelong electronic monitoring of certain sexual predators.
In all this flurry, Claxton's suicide has cast a gray shadow over what to many is a black-and-white issue. It has raised the question of how far people should be allowed to go to protect their children from sex offenders -- and whether a sex offender can ever fully pay his debt to society.
...A flu vaccination at age 10 led to a viral infection [meningitis] that put [Claxton] into a coma. He awoke to a world of wheelchairs and leg braces, of seizures and epilepsy and no bladder control -- a world, [parents] Jane and Chuck Claxton say, in which mentally he would be forever a boy.
In 1991, prosecutors in Tacoma, Wash., charged the then-24-year-old Claxton with two counts of first-degree child rape. Police say Claxton took his caretaker's 6-year-old daughter up to the attic on several occasions, had oral sex with her and forced her to perform oral sex on him.
...Claxton's lawyer remembers him as slow and unable to focus, though not legally incompetent. Claxton pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of first-degree child molestation and was sentenced to 27 months in prison.
Following his release, Claxton had twice-monthly sessions with a therapist.
"He has repeatedly emphasized the importance of avoiding contact with children," psychologist Sally Wing wrote to corrections officials in 1994. "His offense appeared to be opportunistic, rather than one involving a cyclical pattern of offending."
...[Before Claxton's suicide,] [Marion] County Commissioner Randy Harris [had] introduced a proposal to put up metal signs in neighborhoods where sexual offenders and predators live. In their anger and frustration, the Claxtons lashed out at Harris, accusing him of whipping up a kind of sexual "McCarthyism" that contributed to their son's death.
Harris -- a three-term Republican with a Christian flag on his desk, the Ten Commandments on his office wall and a "Choose Life" license plate on his pickup -- says Claxton's death was tragic. But his compassion extends only so far.
"If anyone construes him a victim, he's a victim of his own circumstance," he says, citing Claxton's crimes in Tacoma.
"I believe that Mr. Claxton had prior emotional and psychological issues that had far more to do with his death than these signs."
But attorney Antoni Froehling, who represented Claxton in his criminal case, finds it all too foreseeable.
Froehling has a problem with a system that outs sex offenders but not burglars, drug dealers or murderers, and he believes this kind of public branding only makes it harder for sex offenders to reintegrate into society.
"I don't see any evidence that it has any impact," Froehling says, "other than to make the gap-toothed rednecks of the world feel better about themselves."
Carolyn Atwell-Davis, director of legislative affairs for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, says what happened in the Claxton case was "dangerously close" to vigilantism.
"The fact of the matter is, they will live in our communities," she says. "There aren't enough spaces in prison.... So we must look at the best approaches to dealing with this instead of giving in to hysteria."
(Full story here.)
I believe in protecting our children against real threats to them, but Chuckie Claxton didn't seem to be a real threat.
No, the motivation of the person or persons who anonymously plastered Claxton's neighborhood with "CHILD RAPIST" posters wasn't to protect any children, but was, as Claxton's attorney indicated in the news article above, to get a cheap thrill in his or her pathetic, small life by demonizing Claxton.
Where in the fuck are the people who are obsessed with finding out if any sex offenders live in their neighborhood when the Bush regime diverts billions and billions of our tax dollars from education and health care and environmental protection for our children to corporations?
How can they claim that they give a shit about our children when they are perfectly OK with the Bush regime diverting billions and billions of our tax dollars from our children's needs to the war profiteers' greed?
How can they claim to give a shit about our children when the Bush regime is guaranteeing future terrorist attacks on Americans and American interests by committing atrocities against innocent Muslims in Iraq -- and when they don't make a fucking peep?
How can they claim to give a shit about our children when the Bush regime continues to sell out the environment to campaign contributors in its pay-to-pollute environmental "policy" -- and they not only don't object, but buy larger and larger SUVs on which they slap their astoundingly hypocritical "Pray for Our Troops" magnets?
How can they claim to give a shit about our children when the Bush regime has given us the largest federal budget deficit in the history of the United States -- huge debt that our children are inheriting -- and they aren't up in arms about it?
The answer, of course, is that they don't give a flying fuck about our children.
They hate their miserable lives and because they're too stupid and too cowardly to go after the real cause of our nation's problems -- the plutocrats whose greed knows no bounds, the treasonous war criminals in the White House and in the Republican Party -- they go after the weak and the powerless, such as Mexican nationals who are willing to work very hard for very little and mentally slow sex offenders in wheelchairs who have done their prison time but are to be punished for their entire lives.
Most insulting and nauseating is that these vigilantes call themselves "Christians" -- as though Jesus Christ, who taught forgiveness and love and charity and not judging others, would viciously attack the weak and the powerless like they do. No, Jesus Christ hung out with the kind of people these "Christians" persecute in order to feel absolved of their own many sins and to feel better about their miserable selves.
And if you think that Jeb Bush gives a shit about Florida's children any more than he really gave a shit about Terri Schiavo, you're dead wrong. Jeb Bush signed the abovementioned legislation regarding sex offenders because when he and his Republican cohorts -- like the abovementioned county commissioner (whose tacky office decor clearly demonstrates that he doesn't understand the separation of church and state) and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger -- demonize certain segments of American society -- like gay men and lesbians, Mexican nationals crossing the U.S.-Mexico border to work, and sex offenders who have already paid their debt to society -- it diverts the public's attention from the much more serious crimes against the people that the Republicans are committing, such as destroying our environment for personal profits and looting our treasury, largely by starting bogus wars in which thousands of innocent people die so that the Republicans can steal billions of our tax dollars in their war profiteering.
Gay men and lesbians, Muslims, Mexican nationals, sex offenders, et. al. are for the Republican Party today what the Jews, Slavs, gypsies, mentally and physically handicapped, gay men and lesbians, et. al. were for the Nazi Party: Scapegoats and bogeymen.
And those Americans who let the treasonous plutocrats off the hook and, at the plutocratic traitors' urging, go after the weak and the powerless are part of the problem.
P.S. Tampa Tribune columnist Daniel Ruth wrote that it was Marion County Commissioner Randy Harris who posted the "CHILD RAPIST" signs all over Claxton's neighborhood.
Wrote Ruth:
Rejecting the advice of Marion County Sheriff Ed Dean, who was opposed to the idea, Harris went ahead and posted bright yellow signs displaying Claxton's picture, date of birth, address and the words "Child Rapist'' throughout the neighborhood where the man lived with his parents.
Within days, Claxton -- who had never raped anyone, much less a child -- and in fear of his life from the Ocala community, killed himself.
The technical cause of death was attributed to a drug overdose.
But just as surely, Clovis Claxton died as a result of an overdose of Randy Harris.
For his part, Harris, who probably poses a greater risk to the community every time he opens his mouth, turned tail and tried to cowardly avoid any role in the death of Claxton.
"If parents, brothers or sisters feel victimized, it is not the fault of the general public but of family members who committed the crime," Commissioner Vigilante said. "The responsibility came when the family member committed the crime."
But Claxton, unlike the unctuous pol who contributed to his death, had accepted responsibility for his actions 15 years ago and had -- at least in the eyes of the law, which is supposed to govern civilized people -- paid his debt to society.
Sheriff Dean bemoaned the unintended consequences of what can happen when amateurs ignore police protocols in handling sex offenders. "I understand the concern of parents for their children,'' Dean said. "But we must not allow hysteria to take place."
Who really imperiled the safety of the Ocala community?
A 38-year-old mentally impaired invalid or a frothing lynch mob led by a pol who regards the Marion County Commission as his own personal goober star chamber?
If it's true that Harris posted the "CHILD RAPIST" signs, that certainly would explain his oh-so-"Christian" remarks in the AP story above, including "I believe that Mr. Claxton had prior emotional and psychological issues that had far more to do with his death than these signs." If the Tampa Tribune columnist has his facts right, the motherfucking Harris, who in the AP story above didn't volunteer that he was the one who was responsible for the "CHILD RAPIST" signs, killed Claxton in his little crusade.
If Harris is responsible for Claxton's suicide, I hope that the hell with which the "Christians" try to scare the shit out of people does exist and that the evil hypocrite Harris, who killed Claxton in the name of Jesus, burns in it for eternity -- although I doubt that Satan would have him.
You can try to e-mail Harris here. I did. (I'm not sure whether my e-mail went through or not -- there seems to be a Web server malfunction or perhaps Harris is getting so much hate e-mail that his e-mail has been disabled. If you e-mail him, you can tell him what an asshole he is -- just don't threaten him with any bodily harm, even though he deserves to be bodily harmed. You also can see Harris' picture here -- he looks like a garden-variety certified psycho-"Christian.")
3:11:25 PM 
|
