From an article quoted in “Congress, Courts & National News”:

GPS monitoring bracelets are not punishment…Oh, I’m sure they suck. They might chafe. They could cause blisters. They will cramp your style, keep you out of swimming pools, cause a funny-looking bulge in your nylons, spoil your suntan, tether you to a power source for an hour a day…They’ll subject you to derision  -or worse. And they’re an enormous invasion of your privacy: someone will always know where you are, and if you take off the monitor, they’ll come after you…But a monitoring bracelet is not punishment, the (Wisconsin) state court of appeals says so.

“Per the factual stipulation a person subject to lifetime CPS must wear a 2.5 x 3.5 x 1.5- inch battery-powered tracking devise around his or her ankle for the rest of his or her life,” the court wrote. “It is a felony to tamper with the devise in any way…The devise can never be removed -even when showering, bathing, and sleeping- sometimes causing discomfort and blistering.”

For Abigail, a life-sentence of electronic parole monitoring with an ankle-tether/”bracelet” is a form of “cruel and unusual punishment” in that it’s completely unnecessary to protect anyone from anything. To repeat, Abigail is a first-offender convicted of a nonviolent and victimless and malum prohibitum felony that’s a legal act or at worst a misdemeanor in dozens of other nations, including European countries; she’s never committed a violent or other malum in se crime in her life and never will and is not a “threat to society” or to anyone nor even a danger to “re-offend” by having sex with another young man under age 16 or 18, depending on the age of consent in whatever state she resides in or visits after her release from prison.

The justification and rationale for this “cruel and unusual punishment,” in that it’s wholly gratuitous, is the absurd premise and illusion that’s she’s as deviant and dangerous, and as likely to re-offend, as a low-IQ male recidivist, probably with a history of crime that began at age 13 or 14, who violently raped an adult female or underage adolescent girl, or a pedophile who raped and/or molested prepubertal children, boys or girls, and who’s surely or likely to re-offend if not subjected to electronic parole-monitoring; that she’s predatory, possibly even violent, and driven by a perversion or “paraphilia” and the consequent desires and impulses that she can’t control and must be deterred by 40-60 years of electronic parole-monitoring until she dies in a house or apartment or hospital or nursing home or wherever.

The generic age of consent is 16 in Michigan. If her lover had been 16, just a few months or weeks older and she had not been his tutor or, apparently, a tutor at another high-school, their affair would have legal under Michigan law. But since he was 15, a few months and weeks short of the legal age, she was guilty of a felony with a maximum sentence of 25-year to life in prison and a lifetime of public sex offender registration and electronic parole-monitoring with an ankle-tether/”bracelet” that is conspicuous and cumbersome, causing not only acute embarrassment, profound humiliation, serious inconveniences, hostile encounters,  but also blisters, chafing, cuts, abrasions, rashes; and that can never be removed, even while showering, bathing, sleeping, and having sex with a lover or spouse

As I noted previously, in another post with a similar title, perhaps she’s telling the truth, if not as a whole then largely and essentially; e.g.., it’s possibly, perhaps not likely, but possible, that her story is akin to that of Cassandra Sorenson-Grohall. And that’s why she rejected the plea-bargains. But if she’s lying about everything, as almost everyone not only believes but knows, being omniscient apparently, why would she reject all the plea-bargains?

On a Sunday night 1-2 years ago while riding a stationary bicycle with a small television at Anytime Fitness,  I watched a segment of MSNBC’s Lockup Raw, a weekly TV show that depicts life in U.S. prisons and jails. It’s so depressing -if one thinks of all the people with no histories of violence or serious criminality, people who don’t belong in jail or prison because they’re innocent or, if guilty, were convicted of crimes that don’t warrant incarceration- that I usually don’t even watch it for a few seconds and I’ve never watched even as much as 10-15 minutes during a single evening.

For some reason I watched a few minutes of a segment on the county jail in Sacramento, CA, in which a reporter interviewed a woman who was arrested and jailed as an accomplice to murder because she accompanied her lover to the house of a man he shot to death in a confrontation, possibly in self-defense, and in which she described her first hours of incarceration: She was crying, violently and uncontrollably. She was claustrophobic. She was hyperventilating. She had panic attacks. And this was a young working-class female who appeared to be in her early/middle-20’s, whose lover was an Iraq war veteran who appeared to be in his early/middle-30’s. This woman was surely tougher, psychologically, than Abigail Simon, whose experience of being arrested and jailed was almost surely even more traumatic, hellish, degrading, nightmarish.

So why did she reject all the plea-bargains if she’s lying about everything? The obvious answer is that she so dreaded the penalties to which she’d be subjected under even the least punitive of the plea-bargains she rejected -being enslaved and abused and degraded for perhaps as long as 12-18 months or at least for 5-6 months in a hellish jail with male guards and no privacy and grievous overcrowding, and the fights, verbal and physical, the violence and threats of violence, the awful food, the routine strip-searches, the almost unrelenting, often unbearable, noise, etc., and then subjected to a lifetime or at least 20-30 years of draconian/Orwellian persecution- that she decided to plead “not guilty” and go to trial with the hope, however unrealistic, and the chance, however remote, that she’d be acquitted on all counts and thus walk out of the courtroom with family and friends a free women, legally, free to live as normal a life as possible given her travail and it’s negative consequences: finding a job, interacting with other people, ostracism, hostility, hate-mail, death threats, vigilante violence, etc.

P.S. Sentencing judges are not constrained, in many if not most jurisdictions, to honor the terms of a plea-bargain. If Abigail had accepted a plea-bargain in which she plead guilty to third-degree criminal sexual conduct, the judge had the discretion to sentence her to 6-15 years in prison, the sentence imposed on Kathryn Ronk under a similar plea-bargain. And if she’d accepted a plea-bargain in which she plead guilty to “accosting a minor for immoral purposes,” the judge had the discretion to sentence her to 4-years in prison.