In Austin on Tuesday, the family of Audrii Cunningham strongly urged Texas lawmakers to support a bill that would strengthen sex offender registration laws.
…
Through tears, Munsch pleaded with lawmakers to support Audrii’s Law. The law would add child grooming to the list of crimes that require registration as a sex offender, closing a so-called “loophole” that allows some offenders to avoid the registry altogether.
Can anyone clearly and objectively define child grooming? This bill will allow people to accuse almost anyone of this crime. And as we know, once accused of something like this, there will be no stopping a conviction.
The gist I’m getting from this story is that the guy who kidnapped and murdered never would have done it had he been registered. But there are an awful lot of holes in this story, primarily the specific prior offense the accused committed in 2007 that caused the supposed loophole this bill purportedly closes. And let’s not overlook that there was no sexual component to this particular heinous offense, at least in this story. If there were the slightest indication of a sexual element of some sort, it certainly would have been charged by LE and magnified by the press.
So that should beg the question of how the registry was pulled into this matter at all. It supposedly protects against sex crime, not kidnapping and murder.
” We all check these registries to see if these monsters are walking free” Excuse me most registrants aren’t monsters and had nothing to do with what happened to your loved one. I’d type more about the grandparents, but I really don’t want to get into any arguments.
I’d given the family the benefit of the doubt that they were genuinely helping out a guy down on his luck, but their attitudes here are not those of the kinds of people who bravely do let people into their lives that need help and are far from perfect–I know people like that, and I just don’t think they’d be blaming the system and throwing so many people under the bus for a tragedy like this. I think they likely had some shady business with this guy, and now they’re feeling immense guilt and the lens of society on them, and campaigning for an idiotic bill in the poor girl’s name somehow alleviates that guilt and shifts blame from them, or so they think.
As for “grooming,” when I had to go to a probation-mandated therapy appointment to verify that my voluntary therapy was up to talk, the guy asked me a ton of questions about my history, one of which was about “grooming.” This was in 2005 or 2006, and honestly I had absolutely no idea what “grooming” meant in this context. This was not a word that was in common usage before the late 2000s. Making a registry for a behavior that we’ve only just started labeling seems really silly. Absolutely bonkers to think convicted murderers could be living next door and you’d have no idea but you’d know every “groomer” in town.
I have a big issue with how this family is treating it as something that would have been preventable if only McDougal would have been on a sex registry. They knew this guy was a criminal supposedly even looked into his background and somehow supposedly still didn’t know he had this particular offense on his record. I find that very hard to believe. Even then, as parents they, too should have criminal records for failing to take even minimum precautions to protect their child.
Instead, they blame shift from their lack of proper parenting to blaming the government for not having put this man on a registry. They are effectively saying that they would have parented better if only the government would have held their hand more to do that job. I find it very hard to believe that if this man would have actually been on the registry it would have made any difference whatsoever in this outcome.
Obviously McDougal is 100% to blame for having the offense itself but Audrii’s parents are to blame for the poor parenting that led to McDougal to having the opportunity to do what he did. In any case this could just as easily have been done by someone with no such history at all. Worse, it is parents like this who end up with their child as a victim. If not by this man, ultimately likely by someone else possibly even someone with no record at all.
He committed a sex offense back in 2007, yet doesn’t mention any re-offenses of a sexual nature. If he sexually assaulted or raped the girl it would of been in the article, so the girl’s loved ones failed and blaming the registry, and now Texas registrants and families will pay.
Personally, I wouldn’t let a guy with swastika & Aryan tattoos 😯stay in a trailer behind my house. That should screen him out with 99% of the people. They don’t even have to look him up on the registry to know they don’t want this creep living near them or their family. They say the little girl’s daddy was doing his “Christian” duty. That’s fine, but he could’ve done it off his property.
“Through tears”
I’ve been saying since forever that it’s all emotional manipulation, pettiness and revenge.
Wow, the pics of this guy are frightening. It seems that his personality was a bit frightening also. It’s amazing that he was able to “groom” the parents as well as the grandparents. I wonder what the father and McDougal had in common as friends. There is alot of trust given to a “friend” to have access to your child and to be allowed to drive them to school.
I also wonder when the registry became a parenting tool which overrides common sense?