Priorities

Photo by Sasun Bughdaryan on Unsplash

Not everything is of equal importance. That’s just a simple fact of life. For example, if it comes down to making it to a casual lunch with a friend or taking your spouse to the emergency room so they don’t die, well, lunch is going to be lonely for the friend, and understandably so. Anyone who doesn’t understand isn’t much of a friend.

Hell, I wouldn’t even think the lack of a phone call saying they weren’t coming would require my forgiveness. It’s obvious what happened and I’d understand.

My point, though, is that we all have priorities based on what we think is the most pressing thing before us.

Over the weekend, Shiloh Hendrix, the woman who went viral for the use of a racial slur in a video, reportedly after using the same slur on an autistic black child who took something from her kid. The sentence was 90 days in jail, 200 hours of community service, and a $1,000 fine.

There are issues with this, to say the least, because it still boiled down to someone using their right to free speech in an unkind way, but that’s the least of it for me.

No, the bigger problem is the judge who handed down this sentence.

While taking a hard line on Hendrix’s speech, the judge who ordered the sentencing in the Hendrix case, Christa Daily, has a track record of granting outrageous plea deals, letting convicted sex offenders off with light punishments and little to no jail time.

In January 2023, 54-year-old Thomas Lee Meyer was charged with possession of child pornography following an investigation by the Rochester Police Department. Investigators discovered “several child sexual abuse images of juveniles ranging in age from 6 to 8 years old” at Meyer’s residence. Meyer confessed to law enforcement that “he viewed thousands” of such images on his phone.

According to Minnesota law, possession of child sexual abuse material when the victim is less than 14 is a felony with a maximum penalty of a 10-year jail sentence or a $10,000 fine or both. But Daily allowed a plea deal that had a “stay of imposition for four felony charges of possessing pornographic work and dismisse[d] six other similar felony charges.” The deal let Meyer complete probation, a sex offender program, and 100 days of community service and have his felony charges dropped to misdemeanors. Daily did not have Meyer serve any jail time.

Later that year, Daily also sentenced 64-year-old Paul Alan Collopy to serve 30 days at a detention center after he pled guilty to sexually assaulting a 9-year-old girl several times from 2021 to 2022. He was reportedly allowed to leave the detention center for work and was subject to home monitoring for 30 days after his release.

The pattern of these lightly imposed sentences for sex offenders only continues.

Now, part of my anger is geared toward prosecutors who brought these plea deals to Daily, but there’s plenty of it focused squarely at the judge.

These are sexual predators who are the reason that parents worry about their children, and she’s letting them off with slaps on the wrist that will put them in a position to do all of this again.

Many of these predators are guilty of the kind of crimes that suggest a deep, predatory pathology that can’t just be made to go away because the person doesn’t want to go to prison. They can’t help themselves, even if they want to, and most of them don’t.

And how are they somehow more worthy of almost nothing from the criminal justice system than a woman who dropped a racial slur and hoisted a middle finger while being pursued by someone sticking a camera in her face?

I’m not saying Hendrix is right to have used that word, because I don’t think anyone should use it, but that doesn’t change the simple fact that it’s not illegal to use words we don’t like. If it were, everyone admitting to being a socialist would be rounded up and deported to Cuba in my ideal world.

Since that can’t happen, then Hendrix shouldn’t have even been prosecuted.

But she was, and it seems that she’s getting more time locked up than the guy who sexually assaulted a 15-year-old multiple times.

What the hell kind of priorities does Daily have? How can she look at Hendrix and figure she deserved more time in jail than the sexual predator who raped a 15-year-old kid?

What about the woman who worked at an inpatient facility who got probation for sexually assaulting two of her patients? She got five years of probation…after having five years of probation for a similar offense! In other words, this woman with a history of raping vulnerable patients was allowed to walk around in polite society without a single day in prison as part of her sentencing?

These are the people who got more time than Hendrix, and I’m sorry, but these crimes are infinitely worse than dropping the N-word to a guy—also a convicted rapist, apparently—who was harassing you with a camera, even if you did what he claimed you did.

How can Daily look at these cases and think, “You know, the guy who raped the 15-year-old and the woman who raped a couple of her patients, they’re stand-up people who don’t need to go to prison, but this n-word using woman…oh, man! That’s just a bridge too far!”

Does that make any sense at all?

Look, I’m not really that interested in getting into why Hendrix shouldn’t have been prosecuted. She shouldn’t have, in my book, but that’s another post entirely.

No, I’m focused on this so-called judge’s priorities, because I just can’t twist my brain enough to make any sense out of them. Even if she’s rubber stamping whatever prosecutors bring to her, there should have been a line somewhere that she realized she’d gone lightly on some of the most vile people in her community, people who had done some heinous stuff, and that maybe Hendrix wasn’t remotely as bad as them.

But that self-awareness doesn’t seem to be in existence.

Our children are precious. They should be, after all. They’re the continuation of not just our bloodlines, but of everything. People who hurt them, or support hurting them through materials created by that harm, are people who shouldn’t get off easy no matter what they say or do from then on.

To let them off lightly, while dropping the proverbial hammer on a woman who said a word most people don’t like, though, just takes the vileness to a whole new level.

This is what the left creates. Daily is in Olmstead County, which went for Kamala and Tim Walz by more than four points in 2024. It’s a blue county, and that’s the world Daily exists in. That’s the world that has allowed her to release this absolute filth back into the world, while going harsher on Hendrix.

Nothing about this is right. Nothing at all.

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