Jailhouse Shooting

Fred Grimm of the Miami Herald reports on a hardened criminal case that recently stood trial in Broward County, Florida.

[Ken] Jenne, as sheriff and chief jailer in Broward County, has launched a crackdown on self-abusing miscreants. It's no longer enough to warn hairy-palmed drooling deviants that self-indulgence risks stunted growth, blindness, sallow skin, slackened jaws, amnesia, shrunken testicles, impotence and, for Catholics in particular, eternal damnation. Jenne wants jail time.

And, late Wednesday afternoon, in a triumph of creative law enforcement, masturbation in the county jail became a criminal pleasure. Good for another 60 days behind bars.

Sheriff Jenne, with help from the office of State Attorney Mike Satz, who has taken on additional duties as Broward's dean of boys, notched a law enforcement triumph when a county court jury convicted Terry Lee Alexander, 20, of going at it in his cell last November.

If this was in Canada, they would say that Sheriff Jenne laid charges against Mr. Alexander, but that's cutting awfully close to the bone.

At the time of the offense, Alexander was punished with 30 days without TV, music, exercise time and other jail house perks. But obviously self-abuse demands a criminal charge and a full-blown jury trial, and two prosecutors, and a court-appointed taxpayer-paid defense lawyer and six jurors (and an alternate), and a judge, and a court reporter, and a couple bailiffs, and a pretrial deposition, and a daylong trial.

Not that any of the time and expense of a trial would have any actual effect on the life of the defendant. Alexander was already looking at 10 years for a robbery conviction. But the trial was clearly intended to send a message from the sheriff and state attorney to other sex fiends lurking in their lock-up.

The sheriff's critics, of course, might find the prosecution of a masturbation case curious given the burst of violent crimes that has beset the county lately. They might also point out that Sheriff Jenne, who's feeling the heat of a federal criminal investigation himself, may come to appreciate the sexual needs of a lonely inmate.

It sounds like Mr. Alexander isn't the only person who faces a stiff penalty.

What's ironic is that during the trial, the deputy that popped in on Mr. Alexander while he was, shall we say, at his leisure had to describe exactly what was going on that perpetrated the charges.

In the course of the one-day trial, prosecutor Cynthia Lauriston and Veal managed to describe Alexander's offense in startling detail, eight times, once with Lauriston approximating the action with arm motions. It was hard to imagine the original act could have had a much more lascivious effect than the lurid stuff those poor women had to utter, over and over, in Courtroom 417 Wednesday.

''It was very vulgar. Very indecent,'' Veal testified.

She was describing the crime but she could have been characterizing the prosecution, the trial, the verdict and the obscene, indecent, vulgar, lascivious, downright stupid waste of time and money.

I know people who have worked with Mr. Jenne, and to a person they say he's a bit of a jerkwad.

If you have any forthcoming thoughts on this matter, shoot.

Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.