KY Gov. Proudly Defends Decision to Pardon Multiple Convicted Child Rapists, Murderers
Matt Agorist
TheFreeThoughtProject.com
December 20, 2019
Kentucky — On his way out of office, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin dropped a huge batch of pardons and commutations of sentences of hundreds of Kentuckians. While some of these people were rotting in jail for weed convictions or other victimless crimes, many of the pardons consisted of violent criminals and child rapists.
Some of the people on the governor’s list of pardons include Blake Walker, who was convicted in 2003 of killing his parents; Kurt Smith, who as a teenager was found guilty of murdering his 6-week old son; Delmar Partin, who was convicted of beheading a woman and stuffing her in a barrel; Kathy Ann Harless, who left her newborn baby to die in an outhouse; Dayton Jones, who was convicted in 2016 of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy; Patrick Baker, who convicted of reckless homicide in 2017; Paul Donel Hurt, who was serving a life sentence for sexually abusing and sodomizing a 6-year-old girl; Doug Phelps, who pleaded guilty to child porn, and Micah Schoettle, convicted last year of raping a child and sentenced to 23 years in prison.
Doubling down on his decision to pardon these violent criminals and child rapists, Bevin went on the radio this week to defend his decision. He focused in on the child rapist Schoettle to make his case. Referring to the rapist’s 9-year-old victim and her sister, Bevin said that because their hymens were intact, no rape took place.
“Both their hymens were intact. This is perhaps more specific than people would want, but trust me. If you have been repeatedly sexually violated as a small child by an adult, there are going to be repercussions of that physically and medically,” Bevin said.
No one here is arguing that some folks don’t deserve second chances and that innocent people go to jail all the time, but pardoning a man convicted for raping a 9-year-old girl “because her hymen was intact” is horrifyingly stupid.
The former governor is now under fire from forensic experts and scientists — and rightfully so — who aptly noted that scientists have debunked the notion that inspecting a child’s hymen can prove whether they were sexually assaulted. What’s more, experts have found that most survivors of child sexual abuse do not have any physical damage.
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