On another forum, in a thread about the Houston dad who shot and killed her daughter's boyfriend in the house at 2 am, a couple of guys kept referring to the kid as 'the rapist' because he was 17 which is legal age in Texas and the girl was 16. The new Romeo and Juliet laws only keep the adult partner's name off the sex offenders registry, this if the partners are within 4 years of each other in age and the younger above 15, they do not make prosecution for statutory rape off limits. I only know this from researching it for that thread.
Whatever the kid did, I was put off by referring to him as a 'rapist,' so I found these details of two different cases of vigilante would-be justice for sex offenders I had heard about, similar only in the presumption of the right to take punishment into one's hands:
The Folly of America's sex registry laws
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In 2006, a pedophile-hunting gunman shot 24-year old William Elliot after he found William's name on Maine's online sex-offender registry. As William's mom told Human Rights Watch, "Without the registry, he would still be alive today." How did Elliot end up on the registry? When he was 19, he had sex with his girlfriend three weeks before she turned 16, the age of consent in Maine. Sadly, William is not the only victim of this kind of violence. In the last decade, there were at least half a dozen documented vigilante murders of registered sex offenders and likely hundreds more cases of assault.
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The killer was Stephen Marshall, a 20 year old Canadian who traveled to Maine to kill Elliot and who then shot himself when police stopped the bus on which he was riding.
Here's another guy who killed two sex offenders, one actually pretty vile and the other a 28 year old father of two who, like Elliot, wouldn't have been on the sex offender registry if Romeo and Juliet laws had been on the books when he was convicted.
Patrick Drum Who Killed Two Sex Offenders Gets Life Sentence - ABC News
This smirking twit, Patrick Drum, had recently become Blanton's room-mate, and had reportedly known him for 10 years. Not sure if Blanton and the wife were separated, the wife spoke at Drum's sentencing, in the video on the link just above, and sounder devoted to her slain husband. Like Marshall, Drum also had numerous supporters, some of whom were harassing Blanton's widow and children, according to her. Drum was sentenced to life w/o parole for his crimes.
Blanton's crime that landed him on the registry?
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But Blanton's wife Leslie said he had a consensual encounter with a high school freshman when he was an 18-year-old senior, and only confessed to third-degree rape because he was "caught having sex in high school."
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Read more:
Unrepentant Washington vigilante who killed two registered sex offenders gets life in prison - NY Daily News