Roy Exum: Our Double Travesties

  • Sunday, July 24, 2016
  • Roy Exum
Roy Exum
Roy Exum

Back when we were kids the old guys taught us how to throw a one-two punch. It’s pretty impressive if you do it right, which is to jab your left fist into the thug’s face and then, as though it was a symphony, complete the combination as you deliver a powerful right cross to the same nose. If the thug has a gun, it doesn’t work as well.

But, boy, did our community ever get clobbered on Friday. The lead punch came in Hamilton County Criminal Court when a roach named Alexander Rodriquez admitted the statutory rape of a 15-year-old girl – after the child was entrusted in his care as he drove a school bus. What is untenable is that the rapist was then released from a suspended four-year sentence after just 100 days were served. That’s three months and 10 days for defiling a girl who just happened to ride on our newest monster’s school bus.

Rodriquez admitted to Judge Barry Steelman he forced the child to perform oral sex and then, when the child said the actual rape was hurting her, she said that Rodriquez replied it was supposed to be like that … “I’m trying to make it hurt!”

Not to be outdone, the second absolute tragedy unfolded in nearby LaFayette, Ga., where a medical doctor from Chattanooga, Vikul Vinobhai Patel, agreed to move back to India if District Attorney Chris Arnt would not prosecute him for arranging to have sex in Rossville with a 14-year-old and an 11-year-old in a sex sting. Get this, the police even found kiddie porn on Patel’s computer but this twisted nephrologist (a kidney specialist) skips town with no charges and no record for buying a plane ticket to New Delhi. Are you kidding me!

I am not a judge, and judgement belongs to the Lord, but I honestly believe I could offer the raw evidence in either case to a platoon of combat Marine veterans and one well-placed hand grenade would provide a far-better and longer-lasting solution to both outcomes.

Oh, I know … I am broken out right now with “extenuating circumstances” but as of this morning we have two pedophiles back on our streets. Rodriquez, who raped the 15-year-old at the Super 8 hotel on Lee Highway in March of 2015, was originally booked on $350,000 bond, but after it was reduced to mere $15,000, he paid it and has since been free. He will be monitored as a sex offender for the next 10 years, wearing an ankle device.

Thank goodness that when the rapist Rodriquez gets the monitor taken off, his victim will then be 25, and will be old enough to vote. But there is no way to know what age she will be before she may be able to get her arms around what happened to her innocence in middle school one day when school got out.

In Patel’s case, the district attorney indicated the lead law enforcement officer in the case had become compromised and that the Department of Justice had refused to allow the officer to testify. The Walker County DA claimed he could not prosecute Patel without the testimony.

When a former Vanderbilt football player was found guilty of sexually abusing a coed earlier this year, he was given a 15-year-sentence, this after a Stanford University swimmer was held up to world-wide scorn after he was sentenced for just 90 days for another rape.

Then there is this: Leighton L. Dunn was sentenced to 58 months in federal prison by Judge Travis McDonough Friday after Dunn, a felon, was found to be in possession of a gun in a carjacking in August of 2015.  Dunn spent the majority of his 20s in Georgia prison before was released in March of 2015. In 2005 he was convicted of a violent aggravated robbery.

“I was doing good,” he told the judge, “but I fell in that same rut. Before I knew it I was caught up. I was back.”

Judge McDonough told Dunn, “It’s time to get a new profession.”

But how does that work? Four years and 10 months for having a hidden gun, versus 100 days for the statutory rape of a 15-year-old who is absolutely under the age of consent, to a pedophile physician with kiddie porn on his computer who merely has to buy a one-way ticket to India?

Don’t you dare ever fail to vote!

royexum@aol.com

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