Haase Throws the Book at Mosher, by Tony Palmeri, 12/11/2002:

Oshkosh Winnebago County Circuit Judge Robert Haase today sentenced former Oshkosh North Drama teacher Laurie Mosher to 6-years in the Wisconsin prison system, including 30-months behind bars and extended supervision. Mosher, who admitted earlier this year to having sexual relations with a 17 -year-old North student, cried hysterically as the sentence was read.

In making the sentence, Haase said he focused on three issues: (1) the seriousness of the crime, (2) Mosher’s rehabilitation needs, (3), the need to protect the public. Haase seemed unmoved by the crowd of Mosher supporters in attendance. In fact, when Mosher’s attorney protested that a $10,000 cash bail to release Mosher while she appeals was excessive, Haase said that supporters in attendance should just “chip in” and they could easily raise the cash.

Mosher’s attorney argued….that the crime was on the “lower scale of seriousness” given the fact that the victim was seventeen and a half at the time the sexual relationship started, and that Mosher should be sentenced to probation. He argued also that the press ran Laurie and her husband Mark “out of town.”  He also said that as a result of the newspaper coverage of the case, Mosher has received obscene mail including a nude photo of a man who included a pornographic letter.

Judge Haase argued that the age of the victim was not as important as the fact that he was a student and Mosher a teacher. The judge said the public trust had been violated by Mosher’s actions, and that part of protecting the public includes deterring such crimes from happening in the future….Laurie and Mark Mosher both delivered tearful statement to the court….(uwosh.edu/faculty, palmeri, mosher.htm)

“Seriousness of the crime”: Mosher’s “crime” was so serious that it would have been a legal act in nearly all other nations (save Muslim countries, a different world and story altogether), including European countries; legal in most U.S. states for adults not in positions of authority over their underage teenage paramours; and a misdemeanor in Wisconsin and a few other states for adults not in positions of authority over their underage adolescent lovers.

“Mosher’s rehabilitation needs”: i.e., mandatory “sex-offender treatment” and intensive psycho-therapy, “treatment” and therapy for what exactly, heterosexuality?

“The need to protect the public”: Mosher is a 5′,2′, 110 lb. woman, now 57-years-old, with no history or violence or prior criminality, a first-offender convicted of a nonviolent and victimless and malum prohibitum “crime” who’s never committed a violent or other mala 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 statutory age. I’m 99.99%  certain that not one woman teacher who was convicted of having sex with a male student has re-offended by transporting another young man under statutory age to sexual paradise. And I’m sure none have re-offended by committing aggravated assaults, muggings, armed robberies, burglaries, home invasions. kidnapping, torture, murder, and other mala in se crimes.

Mosher should not have even been charged with a crime, not even a misdemeanor. She should have been punished, non-criminally, by dismissal and revocation of her license and expulsion from the profession -which is more that punishment enough for having consensual sex with a 17-year-old male student and sufficient to deter virtually all other women teachers from having sex with students -in addition to the non-legal punishments of TV news and frontpage media-coverage and, consequently, hate-mail, death threats(?), obscene letters, photos of male genitalia, that drove her and her husband “out of town.”

Criminal justice vocations -police of all categories, prosecutors, judges, guards in jails and prisons- are ideal jobs for those who love to blight and destroy the lives of people who are not violent and dangerous, especially first-offenders  convicted of nonviolent and usually victimless and often mala prohibita crimes, and thus attract the sadistic and/or sanctimonious. This loathsome judge was both sadistic, gratuitously and excessively and inquisitorially cruel, and sanctimonious, a modern-day witch-burner, a new-age Cotton Mather. He obviously reveled in the anguish of Mosher and her husband and many supporters, and joyously swam and bathed, metaphorically, in her “river of tears” and those of her family and friends and colleagues.