A child psychiatrist was allowed to keep his medical license despite pleading no contest to child sex abuse, but hypocritical Texas politicians might have more explaining to do than the Texas Medical Board, which is taking all the heat.
Many Texans are outraged that Dr. William Olmstead has been permitted
to keep his medical license, despite pleading no contest to a sexual
crime against a 10 year-old patient. Now the Dallas Morning News
reports that a second family has come forward alleging abuse. The
father in that case says he's outraged at the Board and that it failed
to respond to the family's complaint.
But the Texas Medical Board says blame really lies with the state's
weak laws on deferred adjudication, a policy that lets perpetrators plead guilty, abide by short-term court orders and then avoid a final conviction and walk away with a clean record. The Board says that since the court
gave Olmstead deferred adjudication instead of a straight conviction,
revoking Olmstead's
license could have taken years. Instead, the board acted to restrict his
contact with children.
"Should the Legislature determine that deferred adjudications should be
treated the same as convictions under the board suspension or
revocation statute, it would allow the board to act more quickly," said
the Board's executive director, Mari Robinson.
Despite its swaggering posture of being tough on crime, Texas has among
the weakest child sexual abuse prosecution practices in the nation. The state's
deferred adjudication laws divert a shocking percentage of child sexual
predators from prison. (See here and here.)
In 2006, PROTECT successfully ended a similar practice of diverting child sexual abusers from prison in California.
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The PROTECT Lobby
Our Mission
The National Association to Protect Children is a national, pro-child, anti-crime membership association. We are founded on the belief that our first and most sacred obligation as parents, citizens, and members of the human species is the protection of children from harm.
PROTECT is a bipartisan pro-child, anti-crime lobby whose sole focus is making the protection of children a top political and policy priority at the national, state and local level.
