KISS AT YOUR OWN RISK!

One of the biggest problems with America is our permissive attitude toward law breakers. Too many bleeding hearts want to coddle criminals instead of the old saw, “If you can’t do the time don’t do the crime.” Personally, I believe in the death penalty…but only for minor traffic offenses.

One of the major problems is that our Courts have backlogs of cases and judges as well as prosecutors take the easy way out and let defendants plead to lesser crimes just to get them out of the way. Our jails and prisons are overcrowded and are spawning grounds for career criminals. Maybe if we changed our methods and instead of sending these depraved nitwits to the slammer sent them instead to Club Meds we’d all be better off. After one visit to the Club Med in Cancun, Mexico I went straight and never again cheated when saying Kaddish.

Even a law and order guy like me recognizes that sometimes the judicial system makes mistakes. For instance Joan Rivers’ plastic surgeon has not had his license ripped up and he forced to take the Picasso paintings out of his waiting room. Joan thought they looked smashing and decided to look just like them. However, occasionally a law remains on the books that seems harsh and could be considered cruel and unusual punishment. A guy living in Salem, Oregon was charged and sentenced in one of these borderline calls. In what seemed a possible overreaction, he was sentenced under Oregon’s three-strike law to life in prison. He got his third strike, a felony sex offense, for delivering an unwanted kiss.

You heard right, buckos, this exterminator, was inspecting the home of a Salem woman when he suddenly grabbed her and kissed her. The woman pushed him away, but perhaps overcome but the vapors from the insecticide he took hold of her once again and sucked her on the neck, stopping when a male neighbor, wearing a chorus girl costume walked in. God knows what those insecticides contain and besides shrinking the brain might make all women look like a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader?

He was convicted of first-degree sexual abuse, which under Oregon law requires the forcible touching of the “sexual or other intimate parts” of another person. Wow! A simple wet kiss or giving a hickey was enough to send this simpleton to jail for the rest of his miserable life. He argued that the neck is not an intimate part of the body, but the Oregon Supreme Court disagreed. Apparently they have declared necks, elbows and belly-buttons off limits.

“In ordinary social intercourse, one adult does not touch the neck of another adult outside of intimate relationship, at least not without some unusual but reasonable justification,” the panel ruled. Talk about a bunch of over-achievers. The court also disagreed that the sentence was cruel and unusual, noting that the three-strike law was not aimed at the gravity of a particular crime but at habitual offenders. It turns out that this guy had been convicted of nine prior sex offenses before the kiss. Among his other sexual offenses was: licking a postage stamp while it was still in the stamp machine; making obscene calls to a farm for deaf turkeys; and dancing nude with a rake.

The lesson to be learned here is watch who you lip-lock or neck-bite while in Oregon if you are an exterminator or an albino.