by Charlie Clark, September 4, 2019 5:27 PM
Our Man in Arlington.
A culture-clash of a trial will resume in late September in Arlington Circuit Court. The scantly reported-on civil procedure involves the disturbing topic of predatory sexual behavior and the Virginia laws intended to protect potential victims.
The trial, preliminaries for which I attended Aug. 26, involves an Arlington family eager to spring a son from an open-ended incarceration they feel the state is pursuing to make a statement against a gay man.
Galen Baughman, 35, a graduate of H-B Woodlawn Secondary program who studied opera at Indiana University, is a convicted sex offender.
His troubles, according to materials given me by Philip Fornaci, a civil rights attorney cooperating with Baughman’s legal team, date back to when he was 14 and had apparently consensual sex with a fellow teen. At 19, he was convicted of that and sex with another underage boy and sentenced to seven years in Virginia prisons. The state kept him longer, until a two-day trial in March 2012, when a jury refused to label him a sexually violent predator.
Released on probation, Baughman became a spokesman advocating reform of sexual predator laws, recording a Ted Talk and winning a Fellowship from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. In 2015, he was accused of violating parole, for texting an allegedly inappropriate conversation with a 16-year-old. The state rearrested him in 2016.
Lawyer Fornaci, in a Washington Post op-ed, noted that under the Sexually Violent Predators Act, “people who have completed their criminal sentences under any of a large number of sex-related offenses can be indefinitely detained in a high-security facility until the state determines that they no longer present a risk, typically never.”
Judge Daniel Fiore is considering Baughman’s mental health. As the court prepared for voir dire, he grew annoyed that the defense team requested more time than the allotted five days. The defense plans to challenge the commonwealth’s paying an expert psychologist appointed by the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services. They also plan to probe jurors for bias in attitudes toward Soros and the topical Jeffrey Epstein case.
The commonwealth’s lawyers, who have the burden of proof to keep Baughman in prison, consulted the deputy attorney general during a recess. They then argued the tightened schedule created “too prejudicial an environment for the Commonwealth to receive a fair trial.” Judge Fiore reluctantly rescheduled it for two weeks starting Sept. 30.
My queries to Attorney General Mark Herring’s office went unanswered. Local Commonwealth’s Attorney Theo Stamos confirmed that the original case came out of her office, that Baughman pleaded guilty, but said she has nothing to do with the AG’s current pursuit.
Delegate Patrick Hope told me, “There’s nothing about Galen’s past that suggests he’s dangerous or likely to reoffend. But Virginia’s [sex] laws and civil commitment proceedings, in particular, are so arcane and seriously flawed, the AG’s office is blindly following a pattern of prosecution that is neither evidence-based or just. This area of the law is in serious and desperate need of reform based on science and evidence.”
Baughman, after three years in Arlington jail, sat wearing a suit cheerfully chatting with his two pro bono attorneys, his mother and grandmother behind him.
Ray Anderson, Baughman’s high school principal, was there to vouch for his character back when he was an Arlington teen who merely wanted to be a singer.
Source: https://fcnp.com/2019/09/04/our-man-in-arlington-339/
If you will permit me a daydream thought… a fantasy or image… nothing real–nothing is ever real in the world of civil committment…
I wonder how long it will be before the Virginia Civil Commitment prison is stormed like the US Capitol? Imagine mobs breaking down the doors! I can’t wait to see the psychologists, psychiatrists, and prison guards running for their lives, cowered behind chairs, thinking their lives are going to end, just like the politicians in Washington.
… but it is just a dream, a fantasy. Because we know then that the ‘terrorism’ of the public will be put on trial. The entire machinery of the establishment media will be put to use to condemn the rioters. New laws will be passed to be more strict, and increase surveillance. The terrorism of the state will never be put on trial. The terrorism of the state will never be curtailed by the law. The terrorism of the state will only ever increase. And all attempts to “reform” it will fall into the dust.
It is obvious that America can only be saved only through armed revolution that overthrows the economic elites. But without a united spirit, that revolution will necessarily be bloody, chaotic, and ultimately destructive of the United States. The United States will not be saved by revolution now, only balkanized, leaving it destitute, the dream destroyed.
No. Fighting for America is hardly worth it.
In this daydream expressed in the twighlight hours of American democracy, we share the perspective of the Stoics who, living as we do in the dying days of an Empire, knowing they could not change anything, knowing their collective and individual end was coming fast, embraced the only thing left to them: staying calm in the face of death.
… something that January 6th proved the cowards running the tyranny are incapable of.
As always, men forced to the extremity of existence by hardship will find new strength, new imagination, new hope, that the flabby protected classes, protected in their cages of privilege, will never know. The ambitions of great travellers has always been fueled by the feeling that they can never go home, but can only embrace new contintents!
America is dead to us. The world beckons!
I worked with Galen over email as the computer consultant and webmaster for a justice reform non profit I have been involved with for over 30 years.
This judge and AG Herring had lost their case the first time but when the State’s own psyiactric expert declared Galen was NOT an SVP corrupt Herring shopped around for some “expert” who would, without even examining Galen, pronounce him “dangerous”.
Then they made sure that Galen’s defense were barred from telling jury he had been found NOT GUILTY re. commitment once before.
Galen had become an advocate and a Soros Fellow in the fight against an unjust and punitive system. Most who know this story believe he was railroaded by AG Herring and Virginia to silence his activism.
This is what is the new normal here in America now.
Update Oct 10, 2019
Galen Baughman lost his Civil commitment jury trail in Arlington, VA today. The Jury of 6 voted that he should be identified as an SVP. This is an incredible injustice. Galen’s only crimes were punished by a very long prison term that started when he was about 19 years old. He served his time in prison for a crime that he admitted to. He has broken no laws since then and now at about 36 years old he will be sent to Virginia’s Civil Commitment prison where the prisoners are treated worse than inmates in a normal criminal prison, and many people only leave in a Body Bag. How could the jury find him to be sexually violent after all this time offence free? I believe that it was because the biased judge in this case prevented the jury from hearing the truth. This judge needs to be removed from the bench permanently and also should be prevented from ever practicing law. The prosecutor should also be fired and most of all the criminal who claimed to [be] the the states expert should be prevented from ever giving testimony again, since almost everything she says is a lie.
Government officials thinking they are above the law, are as crooked as politicians who bend it and cover up their crimes while punishing the rest of us who cannot afford to fight them. If he was a billionaire he would not be in this mess, find a way to hit them where it hurts, I. Their wallets, then you will see the tables turn.
Stories like this remind me of when the Jewish people were persecuted in Germany when their papers were marked with a big J, and their travel papers were revoked and they could no longer come and go as they please . They too we’re on our registry of their time , and look what happened to them and the German leaders? They were executed. Now history is repeating itself with the modern-day registries it’s no wonder Germany cringes at the international Megan’s Law , they saw what happened in the past and they can see it happening all over again.