BONER CANDIDATE #1: AND NOW THE PASTOR GETS WHAT HE DESERVES
A jury of three men and nine women found Kenneth Adkins, a controversial anti-gay pastor, guilty on all eight charges in the sexual molestation of a teenage girl and boy at his church seven years ago. The jury took about an hour to deliberate. Adkins showed no emotion as the jury provided the verdict. He will be sentenced April 25. The four-times married man with 10 children had no family present for the verdict nor any day of the week-long trial. Georgia has strict mandatory minimum sentencing laws and because Adkins has a prior record, there’s a possibility he will never be a free man. Adkins is 57. Adkins’ attorney said once his client is sentenced, he’ll file the paperwork for a new trial. Kevin Gough maintains the state deliberately withheld pertinent evidence that could have drawn into question the mental stability of Adkins’ accuser. That accuser’s mother left the courtroom in tears Monday. She had attended the waning days of the trial, missing her son’s — an Army Specialist from Fort Leavenworth — testimony. Though not wishing to make a formal statement, she said she was relieved that the trial was over and that her son was believed. Throughout the trial Gough tried to poke holes in the state’s case by questioning the motive of male accuser. Gough was stunned by the verdict and how quickly the jury came to the unanimous decision. “You never know what 12 people are going to do,” Gough said. Adkins is a former drug addict who reinvented himself in Jacksonville when he opened up his public relations firm. Many in North Florida saddled up to him in an attempt to curry the black vote. Adkins, for his part, was fairly successful. He said in multiple phone calls to the Times-Union leading up to his trial that he felt a calling to be a preacher. That’s when he landed in Southeast Georgia. It was here that he made an assortment of enemies for failing to make good on financial promises; for his hard-line Republican stances that tended to put him out of sync with other black people; for basically being inflammatory no matter the subject. Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry tapped Adkins to be on a panel discussion regarding the possibility of expanding the city’s Human Right Ordinance to include gays, lesbians and transgender people. Adkins told the Times-Union he was picked by multiple pastors to trumpet their anti-gay, anti-expansion stance. He said he was paid for his efforts that included posting lewd and inflamatroy charictures of former Mayor Tommy Hazouri in the restroom. In his one-hour and 20-minute closing statements, Gough on eight ocassions told jurors their dislike for Adkins could not be enough to convict him. “Hypocrisy is not a crime,” Gough said. He was convicted of grooming two teens — youths he was supposed to me mentoring — to have sexual intercourse first in front of him so he could judge if they were doing it properly to eventually joining in on the acts himself. Last week the jury saw two photographs of Adkins’ penis that he sent his male accuser in 2014. And they saw several electronic messages sent between Adkins and the female.
BONER CANDIDATE #2: HOLOCAUST CENTERS
The White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, set off an intense backlash on Tuesday when he suggested that President Bashar al-Assad of Syria was guilty of acts worse than Hitler and asserted that Hitler had not used chemical weapons, ignoring the use of gas chambers at concentration camps during the Holocaust. Mr. Spicer later apologized. During his daily briefing for reporters, Mr. Spicer was defending President Trump’s decision to order a missile strike on Syria by trying to lend gravity to the actions of Mr. Assad. American officials accuse the Syrian president of using sarin gas, a lethal chemical weapon, in an attack on a rebel-held area of Idlib Province last week that killed dozens, many of them children. But in misconstruing the facts of the Holocaust — Nazi Germany’s brutally efficient, carefully orchestrated extermination of six million Jews and others — Mr. Spicer instead drew a torrent of criticism and added to the perception that the Trump White House lacks sensitivity and has a tenuous grasp of history. “We didn’t use chemical weapons in World War II,” Mr. Spicer said. “You know, you had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.” He continued, “So you have to, if you are Russia, ask yourself: Is this a country and a regime that you want to align yourself with?” The White House charged Tuesday that Russia had sought to cover up the Syrian government’s role in the chemical attack. Asked to clarify his remarks, Mr. Spicer then acknowledged that Hitler had used chemical agents, but maintained that there was a difference. “I think when you come to sarin gas, he was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing,” Mr. Spicer said, incorrectly, before mentioning “Holocaust centers,” an apparent reference to Nazi death camps. 160,000 to 180,000 Jews killed by the Nazis were from Germany, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
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