The case of Judge William Adams who was taped beating his disabled child was appalling. It was hard to watch over a long period of time. The district attorney in the area where the event occurred was on MSNBC and basically said there was no way he could try the case under legal grounds. He laid out all the options he had at his disposal and essentially because of the age of the child at the time of the beating and the amount of time that had passed since the beating it was not possible to bring the judge up on charges.

Wendy Murphy, a child advocate no stranger to the talk show circuit, essentially said the district attorney was not being honest with the public and that he didn’t prosecute because of political reasons. As silly as it sounds, I’m not a judge or lawyer but I do watch a lot of Law and Order and watch a lot of news. If I take the district attorney at his word, that he exhausted all possibilities with the incident on tape, he probably would have a difficult time prosecuting on another incident, if he were able to maneuver it pass the statute of limitations.

Now, like I have to do when I write about issues like this, I have to say I am NOT an advocate for the abusive judge in this case. Yeah, I would love to throw him in jail, but I’m feeling this because I have seen the video. The video is a key piece of evidence if you could prosecute for the incident recorded. Now, if the daughter has a recording of other incidences, then there might be questions as to why the district attorney couldn’t follow up with those. Here is my thinking; if the daughter only has tape of one incident, it could be used on that incident but it might be difficult to get it introduced for another incident. If I charge you with littering in January and I have you on tape littering in July, I can’t use the July tape to show a pattern of littering from January, if all the evidence I have otherwise is one person’s word against another. However, if I have five tapes showing you littering at different times, especially if one of them has you littering in December, there might be a way of introducing the tapes in showing a pattern. There’s no guarantee it could be done, but legally there might be a better precedent than one taped incident.

That was probably the main reason, I would speculate, why the district attorney didn’t prosecute. What could be a bigger issue is the jury pool. Let’s blunt, this is Texas we’re talking about. Old school justice. When I first heard about the tape, I didn’t watch it. By the brief description I was given I thought back to my days as a kid. My parents spanked me, even with a belt, and as I thought about it, before I saw the video, I figured the beating wasn’t any tougher than the spankings I got as a kid. Needless to say when I saw the video it was worse than I thought. Now I talked with two other people who saw the video and they had the initial reaction I had; which was it was all about nothing.

From what we know, the video is the damning evidence. Describing the scene may make some people think it is abuse, but to a good number of people, especially those growing up in an area like Texas, parents spank kids all the time. Notice how I use the word spank to describe what my parents did and beat to what this judge did. Spank brings up one image, beating another. The video clearly shows a beating but if the video isn’t in evidence, a defense lawyer is going to say spank at every turn, and a good number of jury members will probably think back to their parents and spanking.

I don’t envy the district attorney because with the amount of people who have seen the video, which is over ten million, there will defiantly be a clamor to do something against the judge in the video. The problem is legally there isn’t a whole lot that can be done. Thankfully, this judge is in an elected position so hopefully people will kick him off the bench with the power of the ballot.