Woman Faces 90 days & $1000 Fine for Sitting in Public Park
Sandra Catena was tired and looked around for a place to sit. She finds a nice bench in the park and minutes later was confronted by police officers asking if she had a child. When she said no, he called for backup. "Do I look dangerous?"
NYC Parks Dept had designated the playground for children or children with adults only in 1996. This was to protect children from pedophiles, said the NYPD. A small sign reads: "Playground Rules Prohibit: Adults Except in the Company of Children."
The Parks Dept. source said the rule is needed but that discretion should have been used. "A woman walking into a playground in the middle of the day...and getting a ticket is not the way you'd want to enforce the rule," the Parks Dept source said.
Yes the land of the free, where there are still rules and laws that once again must be followed. That ordinance is there for a reason, to protect children from predators. She broke the law she paid the price. I am really sick of hearing how bad it is when some idiot breaks the law and gets what they deserve. If you don't want trouble don't look for it.
She got what she deserved? Last time I checked, public parks are owned by the public for public use. If someone without a child is not allowed into a park because they might be a pedophile what's next? No one with colored skin is allowed into public parks because they might mug someone? Come on.
In the same way speeding is against the law so is this offence in this area. Obviously this area has a problem with child predators or there wouldn’t be a law for this. Simple as that! She broke the law. No excuses. She will probably get a slap on the wrist and a warning but now she can’t say she didn't know.
What the hell makes people think its ok to whine about it when someone is caught breaking the law that was so clearly posted.
this is illegal. you can not descriminate against people based on age. Thats why all those curfew laws had to be lifted. If they want to stop pedephiles, maybe hold the parent responsible for watching their own god damned kid.
The letter of the law or the spirit of the law? I really dont think this woman was there intentionaly to harm children. (Although I may be wrong in that assumption)
When a punishment exceeds the crime, it lessens the severity of more dangerous crimes.
For example: If we charge 8yrs for dealing pot and 10yrs for dealing crack. Since crack is more profitable and punishment is the same, crack dealing takes the top spot.
So when we charge this alleged pedophile for sitting on a bench in a public park, it makes the zero tolerance our society developped against pedophuckers shake at the core.
@YourKiddingRight: This post is just about the bad law as it is about the threat to the zero tolerance as it is about the plight of this woman. However the politicians whose job is to create laws, have you around to stick up for them and for their vigilante approach to law-making.
In Germany, after WWII there was a case that reshaped western view of laws. The case introduced the concept of "Bad Law".
The nazi party introduced a law that obligated all citizens to report anyone talking against the government. This woman, for whatever reason, reported her husband and he got hauled off to jail. When the war was over he suied her.
Here is the dilemna: She was obeying the law, he was paying the price for breaking the law, case should have been shut and close. However their highest court found that the law to be a 'bad law' and that the citizen should have exerted due diligence and disobeyed it. As such, she was sentenced to jail, ultimately, for obeying the law.
Its a stupid cop. Even the Parks Dept spokesperson said so. Everything has to be subject to measure. In the source the woman claims one cop said it the court would propably thrown it out. On the other hand maybe she was an ass to the cop ... we don't know.
"Its a stupid cop" I have a tendency to agree to such a generalized comment, what can i say, you hit my weak spot.
"On the other hand maybe she was an ass to the cop" So he charges her for something else? and you accept that? shouldn't there be a charge called 'being an ass to the cop' he should have charged her with?
"Its not a bad law" My opinion differs but it does not matter. What matters is that "Bad Laws" and more ubiquitously "Badly Stated Laws (Ambiguous)" and "Incomplete Laws" do exist and we should always be on the lookout for potential abuse. It is just that some laws, the way they are written, lead themselves more to abuse then others.
I'm sorry to point this out, but Banshee is right, public parks are PUBLIC parks. If you take your child out in public, you ought to be watching them. This should alleviate the need for a law such as this. Frankly, I'd rather have cops watching for kids being snatched than watching for people sitting on benches. The cops also overreacted for whatever reason, as was even attested to by the Parks Department spokesperson.
YKR: Why is it that people purporting to be championing a conservative viewpoint are so often defending big government and more laws? I'd like to hear the reason for it from the horse's mouth, so to speak. As a libertarian, I'm irritated at hearing about a woman getting a summons for sitting on a bench in a public park. If it's illegal, I'm irritated that there is a law forbidding such a simple thing. If I go to a public park, paid for by my tax dollars, I should be able to sit wherever I damn well please. If there's a problem in this area, make it a higher priority for police and alert parents, rather than taking the liberal solution of making a band-aid law to fix the problem. If you have more child-molesters on the streets, make the priority CATCHING them, not RELOCATING them.
"Frankly, I'd rather have cops watching for kids being snatched than watching for people sitting on benches." This is more than likely what they were doing. Why is a women sitting on a bench without a child in a park where child and child parent groupings are allowed? The cops doing his job, she was @ the wrong place at the wrong time. I got a possesion charge the stupidest way, being on the property of a raided drug house, then getting charged with tresspassing, and possesion. Sometimes you just get screwed over. I wasn't doing anything but standing on the driveway of the raided house, seeing the damage the raid did. She did nothing but sit down where she wasn't supposed to, and you say she shouldn't be penalized?
Also public parks close @ 11, almost had another tresspassing ticket for that one. Public places have rules to help maintain them. You should learn them before you go there. You're not gonna start driving unless you know a speed limit sign posts the speed limit.
This law should only apply to adult men on their own. And i agree with it, i'm sure its well sign posted and there are plenty of other benches around. The thought of sleezy dudes perving on kids at the playground is sick, for once i agree with you YourKiddingRight.
It's a public park. Paid for by public monies. Any citizen has the right to use that public property as long as the remain law-abiding citizens while on the premesis. In effect, this law is disciminatory agaisnt child-less individuals, and discrimination is illegal.
If it were a private park, they would have the right to establish such a rule, but they are not. I hope she fights it and gets the law overturned.
Protecting children from predators is laudiable, but not at the expense of rights and privlages afforded to our citizens.
when it comes to child-protection laws, I think we've gone overboard in some areas.
I recall a story sometime this last year where a man had to swerve to miss a kid that darted out into the street ahead of him. After he stopped he called the little girl over and caught her arm and was about to deliver a lecture on how she shoudln't jump out into the street like that.
Fitzroy Barnaby is now a registered sex offender because it's a sex crime to forcefully restrain a child.
As i said the law shouldn't apply to women, and cases of men without records would get thrown out in court. The law is there to re-incarcerate known paedophiles hanging around playgrounds. Schools are public places too, should people be allowed to wander around them and hang out there while class is on?
For anyone who has the shortsidedness to argue that all laws are good should be followed, one only needs to remember one of the worst, if not the worst law, in United States history.
The law was basically the following: "A black man can be the property of a white man....aka slavery"
" Schools are public places too, should people be allowed to wander around them and hang out there while class is on?"
Apples and oranges..comparing a school with a park just doesn't work. First off, parks are open air and were 'built' for the use of the general public. Schools on the other hand, are not open air, they have walls and doors and were built for the purpose of education, and are understood to be closed to the general public (ie people know they aren;t allowed to just wander in to a school). Secondly, schools are (legally speaking) private property, if you have no business being in a school or on school grounds you can be charged with trespassing.
Everyone has made a great points of view and it can go either way. Here is what i think in a general term. We don't know WHO is a pedophile. That is why this law was made. For some reason the cop should have just said, if you are not with a child then you need to move on. Or the lady was being rude. Most cops that i run into are easy going and will let you go unless you want trouble. Being that it is a lady some people are saying that is it a crime against her. Well that is BS. If the sign was nice and big and clear then i have no problem giving her a warning or writing her a ticket. But if it is down the road and you really didn't see it, say im sorry i didn't see the sign and will be happy to move on. Yes i ran into some pigs for cops but i haven't seen one that is in a hurry to charge you with something so simple as being in the wrong place and the wrong time. One of those unless you were there or know what was said then it is impossible to say for sure.
1. a law cannot be made to apply only to men. that would be a sexually discriminating law and thus be illegal. Either it applies to both sexes equally or to none at all.
2. This is NYC, the city which went off the deep end to ticket every little infraction that citizens were caught in in order to raise money for the local government.
the one where a woman was told she couldn't eat her candy bar in the subway station. So she went outside, shoved the whole thing in her mouth, then came back in chewing.
I woulda fought that ticket on the grounds that consumption had ended, and digestion was under way, therefore the ticket was invalid as I was not eatting at the time the ticket was issued =P
Actually, Patriotwarrior, the source says the sign was small and the cops were acting twitchy from the beginning. That is what, I think, makes a lot of people (myself included) think this was their overreaction.
Syphon, when I say I want cops watching for kids being snatched, I mean no more than that. You act as if it's only logical that a woman sitting in a public park near children without a child is somehow deserving of suspicion, which is not the case. At least, it should not be in a free society. What's next, making it illegal to be within 25 feet of a child not your own in a public place? She may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but the cops DID overreact, and it IS a bad law. Frankly, I think it's liberal laws like this that put cops into situation in which they react like this. Cops ought not to be watching to see who might be sitting where they are not supposed to be, they ought to be catching criminals. I maintain that this law is useless because all it does is force those criminals to go somewhere else, lurking outside the perimeter, the public bathrooms, or shopping malls. Patriotwarrior points out that we don't know who the pedophiles are, so how much must we legislate before we are satisfied that the few criminal bogeymen in society are no longer a threat? I say we ought to stop making liberal laws like this that restrict the freedoms of the many to mitigate (unsuccessfully, I might add) the threat of the few, and get police back to simply watching for criminal activity rather than breeches of silly laws. I would dismiss her case, or give her a very, very light slap on the wrist. Things like this ought not to be cluttering up our legal system.
Finally, I am also opposed to drug laws, so a story about your unfortunate run in with a bad law doesn't exactly further your position. Just because people are busted for other bad laws does not mean that we should just tolerate bad laws, any more than the fact that the law exists makes it a law to be respected. A law's worth is what makes it important; and this law, accomplishing little, has none.
