Terror in Vermont

"From Liberty Street"

January 14, 2006

The TV pundit Bill O'Reilly has announced that he intends to take over my home state of Vermont. I guess I should be shaking in my slippers.

Not only has O'Reilly decreed that state judge Edward Cashman be kicked out of his job, he has also said that the Speaker of the Vermont House of Representatives should resign her position.

The incident which has raised this furor was Judge Cashman's imposing a life sentence on a man who had molested a child, but suspending all but sixty days of it.

There are quite a few features of the case Mr. O'Reilly has neglected to emphasize. First, the offender Mark Huelett is so limited in intellect he cannot reasonably be considered an adult. He has an IQ of 80 and the maturity of a twelve year old.

Second, according to Republican state representative Michael Kainen of Hartford, if one reads Judge Cashman's sentence carefully, he will see that there's very little chance that Huelett will be held in jail for only sixty days. The judge included an extensive list of conditions for Huelett's release which are unlikely to be quickly met.

Third, Judge Cashman made his decision because he had become extremely frustrated by the way the criminal justice system deals with people like Huelett. Based on his experience of twenty-five years on the bench, he had concluded that simply locking up a defendant of that sort did no good. "I discovered it accomplishes nothing of value. It doesn't make anything better," Judge Cashman said.

One may well disagree with his method of bringing the issue to public attention. But, it doesn't seem to me that his actions were so bad the state should be surrendered to the orders of a national television personality, and, particularly , not to one whose reputation for reasoned judgment is less than exalted.

The problem of TV sensationalism is getting ever more bothersome in America. O'Reilly touts himself as a great defender of American youth. But what he's really out to defend are his own ratings. If he cared about kids he would use his publicity machine to expose the conditions which harm the greatest number of children in America -- inadequate health care, for example. But O'Reilly never deals with anything like that. Instead, he plucks out cases he can slather with yellow sheet journalism and fulminates incessantly about his outrage. Last Friday night on his TV show he denounced the fuzzy thinking that has "permeated" Vermont and declared that he's not going to put up with it. I'm sure there is fuzzy thinking in Vermont, like there is anywhere else. But what O'Reilly knows about it wouldn't cover the bottom of a thimble. And, in any case, nothing I've heard in Vermont over my long residence here approaches in sloppiness O'Reilly's own lucubration. If we can believe he actually means what he says, then his own brain is in need of treatment just as much as Mr. Huelett's is.

O'Reilly, though, is not really the issue. He's just a shallow-minded publicity hound. And there will always be people like him in the entertainment business. What we need to ask ourselves is why men of his ilk are listened to and are allowed, in some cases, to direct the agenda of public debate. Are we really so addicted to simplistic thinking we have to make the unusual actions of judge into a black/white melodrama fit only for cheap TV shows? Obviously, when an experienced judge becomes so fed up with the system he is forced to deliver people into that he imposes an unusual sentence in order to draw attention to the conditions within it, our response ought to be debate and investigation rather than the crazed howling of a mob.

My advice to Governor Douglas and to the leaders of the Vermont House, the Vermont Senate, and the Vermont judiciary is not to deliver the state over to the O'Reillys of the world, but rather to use this incident to work on the problems that afflict our criminal justice system. I don't think it's either as dysfunctional or as cruel as the systems of many other states, but it's certainly a long way from perfect. And if Judge Cashmen helps us to realize that, he deserves our thanks rather than being handed over to mob justice.