I’ve been asked several times: what’s it like to represent a sex offender?
After 30 years as a criminal defense lawyer, I’ve represented everyone you can imagine, charged with every kind of crime you can imagine. Still, I have to say that sex offenders are in a category all their own when it comes to criminals.
I think the biggest difference comes from the fact that sexual assault is an “intimate” crime–not that the perpetrator wants “intimacy” with the victim as most of us would consider it. Almost every other crime I can think of–robbery, theft of a car, assault, and even murder, doesn’t involve such close contact with the victim.
Sexual assault is really “up close and personal.” How difficult it must be to be that close and that intimately personal for the perpetrator? (Not to speak of how horrible it is for the victim!) It takes a different type of criminal to commit this kind of crime.
I’m not a psychologist but in my experience, most sexual offenders aren ‘t really turned on by the sexual act as they are by the power and dominance they have for a brief time. Around men, quite often, sexual offenders are losers and unable to hang with men in easy relationships. Most sexual offenders I’ve worked with are loners, misfits, or outcasts. By assaulting women, they “prove” to themselves they are studs and attractive.
What’s it like to represent a sex offender: here’s one particularly dangerous offender I represented years ago, before sentencing for several rape convictions bragged to the probation officer he’d had sex with 100 women. That statement showed up in the pre-sentence report to the judge. At his sentencing, the defendant corrected the report to say he really had sex with over 200 women!!
Almost every offender I’ve represented has denied the act and blamed everything on the woman. Often, they use force also so they accuse the woman of starting it. Even after the victims come into court and testify against the offender and juries find them guilty, the guys still deny their guilt.
Guys who are “kiddie twiddlers,” who sexually assault children are worse to work with. The usual reaction I get is, “I know I didn’t do it.” Then, even after I confront them with evidence through statements of the victims and forensic proof, the offenders still deny everything.
At first, I assumed this was simply the usual human response to deny or minimize our guilt for acts we’ve done. Now, I realize something more subtle is at work.
When you represent a sex offender, you have to realize these men who assault kids find the act inexcusable, like us normal people do. They think it’s so horrible that they, the offenders, could never possibly have done it because…well, because “I could never do anything so horrible and gross.” They successfully block any memory of the act out of their conscious minds—which makes them even more dangerous.
Any thoughts from you?
