“A 39-year-old Southern California man has been arrested for misdemeanor child annoyance after allegedly paying a teenager $31 to spit in his face. The Ventura County Sheriff’s Department says Charles Hersel was arrested Wednesday in a sting operation at a mall in Thousand Oaks. He’s free from jail pending a court hearing. A sheriff’s statement says Westlake High School students claimed Hersel paid them to yell profanities, spit and slap him in the face. Several also claimed he offered them cash to urinate and defecate on him. A motive wasn’t clear. Authorities say Hersel contacted some teens through the MySpace social networking site. Hersel couldn’t be reached for comment Friday. He had no listed phone number in Thousand Oaks.” — San Francisco Chronicle (U.S.)
Here is a photograph of Mr Hersel. He has brown eyes, a small mouth, large cheeks, and ears that look like they’ve been surgically stapled to the sides of his head. The news reports make no mention of his profession, but his appearance suggests a line of work ranging from sports agent to car salesman. Of course, appearances can be deceptive. His colleagues, whoever they are, probably had no idea he liked to be humiliated by the Westlake Warriors. According to another report, “It didn’t take long for word to spread among local teens that they could get paid to spit in a man’s face.” Easy money.
Unlike the “saliva fetish” pervert — a guy who would obtain spittle from young girls under false pretenses and then masturbate with it — Mr Hersel apparently sought from teen boys what many men seek from sadists, masters, and dominatrixes. What he wanted to do was not uncommon, nor who he wanted to do it. Thus far there have been no reports that he sought out boys younger than 16 or so. A law blog expresses skepticism about the worth of even arresting the guy: “After years of practicing criminal law, most lawyers will never see a charge of ‘child annoyance’ being prosecuted. The question for many is whether with California’s budget crisis, this is a crime truly worth prosecuting and spending precious local resources on.”
It would be interesting to calculate how much money is spent every year on the criminalization of sexual behaviors. In America, there has doubtless been a drastic decrease in the amount spent on the criminalization of homosexuality. Conversely, there has been an exponential increase in the amount spent on pedophilia. Probably that is quite rational, since a child has less ability to engage in a consensual relationship with an adult than an adult has to engage with another person of the same gender. But how much is a society willing to pony up to rid itself of any given form of deviance? Is a billion dollars too much or too little to combat perversion x? Or what if the question was posed on a very direct, individual level… How much tax would you be willing to pay to combat, say, pedophilia? Ten dollars a year? A hundred? A thousand? More? Or to the contrary, would you pay to promote rather than suppress it?
??? Weird as all that is, what actually catches my eye is the Thirty ONE $! How come thirty one? I take it ye have 10$ bills? So, he pulled off three of those and then stuck his hand in his pocket for a 1$? Weird!
Oh my. I wonder if this is “Westlake Warriors” specific–there is the off chance that he’s a former football player for one of Westlake’s rivals, still working out some old losing-streak issues? Looks as if he might still be on that streak…. I would be fascinated to see survey results on what taxpayers are willing to spend in this regard–it would come down to “pet peeves,” I suppose, but I’d be interested in seeing what regional variation there is. Could be quite telling.
“??? Weird as all that is, what actually catches my eye is the Thirty ONE $! How come thirty one? I take it ye have 10$ bills? So, he pulled off three of those and then stuck his hand in his pocket for a 1$? Weird!”
Well, maybe the number 31 had some kind of symbolism, significance, or meaning to him. I myself attach meanings to some numbers. Also he probably figured to pay them 31 dollars as he thought spitting in someone’s face wasn’t the hardest thing in the world to do, and there were things he valued more than being spat upon, and these were teenagers. He probably didn’t think they would have gone further than 31 dollars and he probably was old fashioned and didn’t know teens these days have devices like I-Pods and I-Pod Minis. Who knows the mentality of this weirdo?
This is a strange story. However, as an attorney I can tell you that this incident does not meet the requirements for a child annoyance conviction. As such, I believe that a fine, some probation and counseling are in order for this young man. The law is the law. The motive here, if there even was any,can not be considered sexual as there is no evidence for that in the details that the media have documented. This is frankly a waste of tax payer dollars, in Ventura County people are just struggling to survive and feed their families. The cops have real criminals to catch and they wasted their time on this guy. Anyway, such is the criminal justice system in California.:(
No comments:
Post a Comment