[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 1]
[House]
[Pages 903-904]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                 MARCUS DIXON DOES NOT BELONG IN PRISON

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to the order of the House of 
January 20, 2004, the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. 
Norton) is recognized during morning hour debates for 5 minutes.
  Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, today when regrettably when almost half of 
high school students report having had sexual intercourse, I want 
Members to consider the following: How would a court likely react when 
an 18-year-old star high school athlete, a student from a very 
disadvantaged background, manages a 3.9 average, 1200 on his SATs, full 
scholarship from Vanderbilt, is accused by a female acquaintance of 
rape after having sex with a girl less than 3 years younger. Now color 
the boy black and the girl white, and Members may not be surprised that 
Marcus Dixon received 10 years for this teen sex violation.

[[Page 904]]

  To the credit of the State of Georgia, the State amended its law 
almost 10 years ago to deal with sex between teens and made statutory 
rape a misdemeanor. The prosecutor, however, wanted a conviction very 
badly here because he piled on six different charges, most of them 
involving forcible rape, and an additional charge of aggravated child 
molestation which is reserved for very heinous crimes.
  The jury had to contend with two very different versions. He said 
that she suggested please, let us not go to my house, my father is a 
racist and he has beaten me for less. She said she was a virgin and he 
raped her on a table. The jury apparently believed this was one more 
example of consensual teen sex by virtue of the fact that they 
convicted only for the misdemeanor rape charge. However, they left the 
aggregated child molestation charge because of testimony that she was a 
virgin, therefore bled, therefore had been injured; and he, therefore, 
was guilty of child molestation causing injury. For that injury, 
literally millions of teenage boys would be in jail as I speak.
  That is where Marcus Dixon is, but many on the jury are dumbfounded 
because they believed that Marcus would walk out of court with a 
misdemeanor statutory rape conviction with the white couple who adopted 
him from his crack-addicted mother. The case is on appeal.
  Male black, female white, harsh sentence, sound familiar? Consider if 
the girl had been black and the boy white, can Members imagine a 10-
year sentence? Suppose both had been of the same race, can Members 
imagine a 10-year sentence?
  The villain here is not only an overzealous prosecutor who treats 
teen sex as a sexual predator case and disregards Marcus' achievement 
in overcoming the kind of severe deprivation most of us have never had.
  The villain also is mandatory minimums. For minor drug offenses, we 
have put a generation of young black men in jail and left the black 
community with 70 percent of its children with no fathers and destroyed 
the black family. Let us be clear: We must do much more to teach our 
children to abstain from sex, but it is also time to teach prosecutors 
fairness and equal application of the law and to teach ourselves the 
injustice of mandatory minimums.

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