Who hasn’t learned half of all that they know from 20/20? For instance, 20/20 warned me about the dangers of pre-washed salad and Jacuzzi drains, and one Friday evening in the late ’90s, the news show introduced me to the debate about castration as punishment for sexual crimes. A decade later, the discussion is becoming painfully relevant again. The Czech Republic unveiled its policy of mandatory chemical castration, and Poland followed suit on September 25th.
All those years ago, Barbara Walters turned to us and said, “Let me ask you something. Does a man who rapes women and children deserve your sympathy under any circumstance? What if he couldn’t help himself? And there was a miracle cure that would keep him from ever raping again?” She then held a conversation with Joseph Frank Smith, better known as “The Ski Mask Rapist” for his rampage through the San Antonio, Texas area in the early 1980s. Though Smith had already racked up nearly 200 victims by 1983, he was captured during a revisit to one victim.
Smith was facing consecutive life sentences when defense attorney Ray Taylor took up his case. With the consultation of Dr. Fred Berlin, founder of the sexual disorders clinic at Johns Hopkins, Taylor claimed that a combination of traumatic childhood experiences and an unusually high testosterone level, not malicious intent, were the true causes of Smith’s behavior. Indeed, he seemed incredibly docile and remorseful on television. The Texan jurors trying him must have been similarly swayed by Smith’s earnestness, because they delivered a 10-year suspended sentence with administrations of Depro-Provera in lieu of real prison time.
Smith began taking the female contraceptive, believed to essentially neutralize over-sexed men. Things went smoothly for a while, and he even got married to the nurse who was giving him the shots. Then Dr. Berlin and company decided that it was safe to taper off the medication, and all hell broke loose. Reincarnated as the Bandana Bandit, Smith made up to 75 more sexual violations within his new Richmond, Virginia environs after 1987, culminating in his wife’s discovery of him masturbating and ultimately ejaculating over his own daughter and two other sleeping children in 1994. He was arrested in 1995 for counts of cruelty and injury to the children, and criticisms about the castration sentence raged across the nation.
http://genderacrossborders.com/2009/10/16/castration-justice-or-nazi-revival/
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