What the court, or more specifically, the judge rendering the verdict, Jennifer Harlacher Sibum, was a travesty. Even the New York Times made this clear to some extent:
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After hearing testimony from dueling psychologists, Judge Sibum decided that Ritter met the state standard for being classified as a violent predator — despite having never displayed a sexually violent tendency. This meant that he would have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.
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Source:
The former United Nations weapons inspector and fierce critic of the Iraq invasion is still fighting, but now against only himself.
www.nytimes.com
I found no compelling evidence in the New York Times article that Ritter knew that the people he was chatting to in an adult chat room were actually minors, and everyone knows at this point that they weren't.
I think of the following line from Matt Bai's New York Times article that says a lot:
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But Ritter has forcefully insisted all along that he did nothing wrong, beyond betraying Marina’s trust. “Why would I plead guilty to something I didn’t do?” he asked me, when I raised the issue of a plea arrangement. I suggested he might have done it to avoid going to jail.
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And there you have it- Mr. Bai apparently thought he should have taken the please to avoid jail time, the truth be damned. I'll let Ritter have the last word, again from Mat Bai's article:
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“I’ll tell you why it doesn’t matter,” Ritter was saying. [snip] I had asked him whether he thought he deserved some public acknowledgment that his warnings about Iraq and its supposed W.M.D.’s were correct. “Because today everybody knows I was right. I was right about one of the most significant issues in modern American history. I was the only one who was right about one of the most significant issues in modern American history.
“And yet,” Ritter went on, “the common reaction seems to be: ‘Well, that was then, this is now. Yeah, he was right back then, but how does that impact us today, 10 years later?’ ” He shook his head in disbelief. Ritter is an uncommonly articulate man, and when he gets going, the indignation flows in fully formed paragraphs. “What is the relevance of being right 10 years ago? I don’t know — talk about all the dead Americans. It’s relevant to their families, I would think. Talk about the tens of thousands of wounded Americans and the hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded Iraqis.”
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