Rep. Cathy Munoz spent a week on the pillory of media opinion for supporting friends convicted of crimes, then repented Tuesday and withdrew letters she wrote. For a politician running for re-election, it seems that mercy is a sin.
Munoz, a Juneau Republican, asked the courts to delete from the record letters vouching for people who faced sentencing decisions on convictions related to sexual offenses involving children. But the political damage to her re-election bid is already done.
[Munoz retracts letters supporting leniency for sexual abuser, convicted mother]
Dan Coffey ran into the same problem last year when he was running for mayor of Anchorage. In 2005, he wrote a letter supporting a crack-addled local businessman, Josef Boehm, whose house had become an ad hoc brothel with underage girls.
Like Munoz, Coffey didn't question the offender's guilt, but spoke to his character based on knowledge from before the crimes. It's common for defendants to gather up such letters from friends and associates before sentencing to persuade judges they can be rehabilitated. That information, if well-founded, is relevant to sentencing.
The critics didn't focus on that. Mostly, they wrote about the terrible nature of sex crimes. These crimes are abhorrent and should — and do — bring the society's most intense disgust and ostracism. The damage to victims is horrendous and lasting and they deserve all possible support.
But contrary to several writers on her Facebook page, Munoz isn't a "monster" or an "enabler" of child sexual abuse because she wrote to a judge about her hopes for the offenders' rehabilitation. The critics equated her with a sex abuser, which is wrong.
And there is nothing unethical about her writing as a legislator. The letters didn't misuse her office for her personal gain — in fact, the opposite is true. As a legislator, she would have no undue influence on a sitting judge, but her status in the community was relevant to her opinion.
I don't particularly want Munoz re-elected to the state House. But I do speak against vengeance as a public policy. Sentencing should be about public safety, not anger.
The best way to prevent future crime and to save money and human potential is to give the minimum sentence necessary to act as a deterrent, and to combine that sentence with treatment and support to change criminal behavior.
Long sentences do not protect the public. In the United States, we lead the world in rates of imprisonment, but our murder rate also remains among the highest in the developed world. In Alaska, our rates of child sexual abuse and rape are extremely high. We have had long presumptive sentences for many years without solving the problem.
Criminals don't check the statute book to find out the sentence before they commit crimes. Even if they did, a sentence of 15 years would offer no more deterrence than a sentence of 10. Criminals don't expect to get caught. Increasing the fear of detection and prosecution would deter more crime and cost less than long sentences.
Some crimes cannot be deterred by fear of punishment and some criminals are incorrigible. But we cannot afford to keep every anti-social or perverted person in jail for their full lifetime. We have to rehabilitate them when we can and let them out.
At this point in the discussion, someone usually asks, "How would you feel if your family member was the victim?"
That's the question that gets us off track. We want to support victims. But the truth is, if a man sexually abused any of my children, I would want to kill him. The reason we have the rule of law is to avoid that — to insulate justice from personal payback.
Besides, do extra-long sentences for offenders really help abuse victims? Yes, it's important to listen to and respect victims and to have the community denounce the crime and the criminal. But I sense the journey to healing is a lot harder and more complicated than that.
Revenge doesn't cure grief.
I am not arguing to reduce sentences for child sexual abuse. I'm saying people should give information they have about whether an offender has the potential to change. Even politicians.
I also am not giving an opinion on these particular cases. I haven't reviewed all the evidence or read the presentencing reports prepared for the judges.
But I doubt the writers and commenters who hounded down Munoz had that information either. Most attacked Munoz as condoning the crime of child sexual abuse. By that reasoning, only opinions advocating for longer sentences could ever be valid and no sentence could ever be long enough.
Josef Boehm also committed disgusting crimes when he used drugs to entice teenagers into sex.
[Full Disclosure: Boehm's story in the Alaska corruption scandal]
Coffey knew Boehm as his lawyer — not in his criminal defense, but as owner of Alaska Industrial Hardware. He said Boehm was worth $30 million from building that business, but gave half ownership to his employees, making some millionaires.
Boehm committed his sex crimes after becoming addicted to crack cocaine and alcohol. But Coffey, who continued representing him in his business dealings, said Boehm detoxed in jail and went back to his former personality in six months.
The letters from Coffey and other noteworthy people didn't help in Boehm's sentencing. He got the maximum of 11 years in federal prison. When he got out, he took over running the company again and, Coffey said, showed no signs of relapse before he died 18 months later, in 2014.
Perhaps that outcome could have been accomplished with five years in prison rather than 11. If it had, the victims would have been no worse off and society would have saved money.
Coffey paid a price for his letter when he ran for mayor. But he told me, "I would have written the letter again. There were things that needed to be said."
I have never supported Dan Coffey — we were sharp adversaries when I was involved in local politics — but I wouldn't disqualify him, or Munoz, for saying something good about a person who had done something very bad.
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