I am surprised the news of the testimony in the small, filled to capacity Taney County, Missouri, courtroom, did not spread like wildfire.
But then again the case of Christian sports camp counselor Pete Newman, who sexually abused scores of teenage boys over a period of at least a dozen years at Kanakuk Kamps, has remained strangely under the national media radar, as I noted in my May 23 diary.
The southwest Missouri media was out in full force Thursday as Judge Mark Orr sentenced Newman, who has also been charged with sex crimes involving underage boys in Colorado and is under investigation for similar offenses in numerous other states, including Texas, Oklahoma, and Alabama, three consecutive life terms, plus 30 years.
Orr’s sentence came in spite of the testimony of hired gun psychologist Dr. Joseph Plaud of Boston, who said Newman was not a pedophile, but simply had sex with the boys because of his "repressed homosexual urges."
Now when was the last time you heard a psychologist testify that a man had sex with underage girls because of repressed heterosexual urges?
Dr. Plaud emphatically stated that Pete Newman would not offend when he was released if something could be done to deal with those horrible homosexual urges.
And this is the best testimony the defense could come up with for $200 an hour? Of course, this is the same Dr. Plaud who has testified in hundreds of cases across the country over the past several years and has yet to say that a sex offender should actually stay behind bars.
And it is the same Dr. Plaud who gained considerable notoriety for using a machine attached to a man’s sex organ to determine what sexually arouses him. (The men were shown pictures of young girls or boys, but always tastefully done, so as not to violate pornography laws, Dr. Plaud says.)
As I wrote on my blog, The Turner Report, earlier today, Dr. Plaud successfully recommended freedom for one man with a long track record of violent sexual crimes, who then raped and threatened to kill an 18-year-old woman and unsuccessfully asked for the release of a Massachusetts man, who not only had sexually assaulted three young women while on probation for another sexual assault, but then had raped his 14-year-old son while on probation for those three assaults.
It was probably just the man’s homosexual urges.
By ignoring what should have been a national story concerning a Christian sports counselor who had been grooming and then sexually assaulting underage boys in several states over a period of several years, (Would this story have been swept under the carpet had it involved Catholic priests?) the media also missed an opportunity to examine the record of this "psychologist" who has been exporting his brand of junk science to the highest bidder across the United States.
And it is only through the media that people like Joseph Plaud can be accurately described. In a New York case, Plaud failed to keep one of his clients from being locked up, but that man was given a new trial because of an error made by the judge.
That error?
The judge allowed the prosecuting attorney to refer to Joseph Plaud as "a hired gun."
Apparently, justice is not only blind, but it has no use for the truth.