Legal zeal could find better target

COLUMN GOSIER E-mail: Click here Archive

By ELIJAH GOSIER

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 24, 2001

I can understand the outrage.

Anyone with an ounce of common sense should be able to.

In a nutshell, here's the story, well-known by now to readers of this newspaper:

A 13-year-old girl and a 17-year-old boy were dating. Boys will be boys and girls will be girls, so the boy was a boy and the girl was a girl and the baby will be 2 years old in October.

And the boy could be going to jail for performing lewd and lascivious acts on a child.

Who wouldn't be outraged!

A 13-year-old girl and a 17-year-old boy dating!

Dating?

That is outrageous.

A seventh-grader and a junior. That's how the age equivalents fall, although in this case they were actually an eighth-grader, according to her parents, and a young man who had quit school and gone to work as a mechanic. In any event, it was a scenario of someone about to enter adulthood dating someone just reaching puberty.

It is precisely the kind of scenario that makes me grateful I had only boys to raise. Had I been the father of a girl in a situation similar to this one, the story still would have drawn headlines, but they would have read a little bit differently:

FATHER JAILED FOR AGGRAVATED BATTERY AFTER 17-YEAR-OLD BOY HAS GALL TO SHOW UP FOR DATE WITH HIS 13-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER.

Or:

17-YEAR-OLD BOY SHATTERS RECORD IN MILE LEAVING HOME OF 13-YEAR-OLD GIRL HE SOUGHT TO DATE.

I was once a 17-year-old boy, and I know that 17-year-old boys -- to say it in a genteel way -- view life differently from the way 13-year-old girls do. Seventeen-year-old boys are a drop of common sense in a barrel of testosterone. Thirteen-year-old girls are love stories and fairy tales where big bad wolves never wear shining armor.

Mixing the two can be volatile.

So I was curious to hear what the parents of the 13-year-old girl had to say. Did they fall asleep during the movie as they chaperoned their daughter's "date?" Did they lose sight of the pair at Chuck E. Cheese?

To begin with, Al and Cindy Leftwich, the girl's parents, wanted me to know she was 14 and in the eighth grade when she started seeing the 17-year-old boy.

That detail didn't measurably change my view.

Then Al Leftwich, the father, did. He, too, it turned out, had once been a 17-year-old boy. His reaction was similar to what mine would have been, but more rational.

"The first time I saw (him) with my daughter, I called him up and asked him if he was talking to my daughter. He said he was, and I asked him to come by the house," Leftwich said.

He grilled the young man the way someone who used to be a 17-year-old boy would and was impressed with his honesty and grounding -- although he told his daughter she could do better. "You always feel that way," he confessed. "We always want our daughters to marry doctors or lawyers, but they always wind up with someone like us," the father of four girls said.

Leftwich said he approved of the young man and invited him over for family occasions. He even taught him to work in the family business, Leftwich Painting.

"People mature at different ages," he explained, saying that his daughter and her child's father -- now her husband -- were both more mature than their ages would imply.

Now he and his wife are doting grandparents, worried that the state's charges will break up the young family.

"When I tried to read (the story about the case) in the newspaper, I started crying," Cindy Leftwich said. "I gave it to my husband, and he started crying. I care so much about what the government is doing to this family," she said.

They wish the state attorney would just drop the case and said they have heard from many people who support them, including some of the older customers of their painting business who themselves married young.

So far, the state attorney has expressed no intention to drop or reduce the felony charges, a stance whose net result is likely to be more stress on a struggling young family and a batch of additional victims.

That does not incite outrage in me. That is the risk you run when you break the law, even if the law is bad.

Drive 75 mph in a 70-zone and you deserve the ticket, even though you didn't break the law by much and think the speed limit should have been higher anyway.

But this isn't a bad law. Children need to be protected from the wiles of older people, even when the scenario is not the worst case the law envisions of a grown man taking advantage of a young girl.

The real outrage, though, is this:

More than 1,300 children are born to teen mothers every day in the United States, and 71 percent of those are not intentional pregnancies. More than 2,100 babies are born into poverty each day.

Sometimes the fathers are older men -- or boys -- who didn't hang around.

Somewhere those figures intersect. The discretionary enforcement of the law should be watching those dangerous intersections.

Instead, the current case makes it look a lot like they're writing tickets for doing 40 in a 35 zone while cars whiz by doing 90.

© St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.