Should Jim's Lawyer Have Argued for DWI?

Interesting point but the prosecution would bring out the slam dunk of the chat lawg.

As an expert drinker myself, I have no sympathy .

The saying is, alcohol intoxication doesn't change who you are, it simply exposes it.

Drunk driving is one of those things that a good percentage of the time people don't get arrested or crash doing but the one time they do it's a big deal. According to Goggle 29% of people arrested for drunk driving are repeat offenders. So basically 71% of people who get arrested for drunk driving are on their first offense.

Now, let's look at our sample of TCaP predators. What percentage of them were repeat offenders? Westerbeck, Wurley, Hambubger, Harding, etc.... I would guess (and I didn't do the math) but it's about the same 30%ish.

Now, do we believe that only the TCaP reoffenders were the only ones that weren't doing this for the first time? I don't. I think some of them (Stacy, Cogburn, Downhour) were and I think some (Kaye, Bennoff, McPhetridge) were not.

I can tell you that when I was in college I never drove drunk because I didn't have a car. There were plenty of nights where my friends and I would have no memory of what had happened until we all started piecing things together. Drunk texting, which I'm a little old to have done, is kind of the same thing. Person gets wasted and sends crazy text to someone they don't remember sending the next morning.

I know in some states one beer would make someone legally drunk if they get pulled over. I would imagine a lot of those people drive home and never get into trouble. But the one time they get pulled over for a tail light being out or something they're going to be in a heap of trouble.

To be clear, I'm not equating drunk driving with molesting children and I'm not defending someone who drives to the house of a child for sex. I'm just playing devil's advocate in that I wonder if a case could have been made by a skilled attorney to blame Jim's actions on his drinking.

The problem with this argument is that Jim chatted with the decoy over a period of almost 2 weeks, and at all different times of the day.

Add to this the fact that without breathalyzer evidence there would be nothing but the video/audio evidence where Jim is slurring his words to buttress any claims of drunkeness on Jim’s part, BAWT to introduce that evidence the defense attorney would be focusing the jury members attention on those calls and that interview and that’s a recipe for disaster because when they hear that they’re not going to care about whether Jim was drunk or sober, all they’re going to hear is Jim telling the decoy “are you sure you’re really 13?” and “I’m comin’ over to fuck ya!” plus telling his interrogators that he “came there to be for her, possibly sexually too”. Slam fucking dunk. There’s no way a judge or jury lets Jim skate no matter how many Gin&Tonics he claimed to have had that night.

Folks need to realize something about the legal system. Something like 90% of criminal cases that go to trial result in conviction. It is exceedingly hard for the defense to win in a criminal trial even if the defendant wasn’t on tape talking about committing the crime and if photographic evidence of the crime, (Jim’s dick pic), didn’t exist. With the dick pic and the chat/calls, Jim was toast, AND DESERVEDLY SO. His lawyer did what any good defense attorney would do. He sought a plea agreement from the Prosecutor, the best he could negotiate, and then he advised Jim to accept it. If Jim had not done so, and gone to trial, the odds would have been astronomically against him and his sentence would have been far more harsh. Just look at MHS for an example of what kind of sentence you can receive if you insist on trial against the advice of your attorney after a deal has been offered. MHS could have gotten the standard GA Special that most of the other GA Preds got, but he refused and went to trial and lost and got over double the time behind bars.

Jim Rauch is a scumbag pervert, just like his daddy and Uncle Eugene before him. He got what he deserved. If someone commits a crime while drunk, the fact that they were drunk when they committed the offense isn’t a mitigating factor because the individual chose to become inebriated. They made the decision to drink enough to lower their inhibitions and raise their courage enough to commit the crime. Regardless of all that, though, Jim sent a dick pic to someone who identified as 13 and Jim ABSOLUTELY KNEW THIS TO BE TRUE because IMMEDIATELY before sending the dick pic he asks her point blank if she is actually 13 years old. That means that he was sober enough to notice her stating her age as 13, question her to confirm that she was 13, and THEN send the dick pic. It’s within the very first lines of chat. Here is the exchange

“ 12/16/2007

First Contact was a Web cam invite.


sad_cheyenne (04/01/07 7:25:42 PM): do i know u
rauch_jim (04/01/07 7:29:17 PM): doi u want to?
sad_cheyenne (04/01/07 7:29:32 PM): idk
sad_cheyenne (04/01/07 7:30:04 PM): asl
rauch_jim (04/01/07 7:30:25 PM): m/50s horny
sad_cheyenne (04/01/07 7:30:41 PM): 13/f/ky
sad_cheyenne (04/01/07 7:30:50 PM): wheres horny
rauch_jim (04/01/07 7:31:08 PM): cincy
sad_cheyenne (04/01/07 7:31:19 PM): o
sad_cheyenne (04/01/07 7:31:31 PM): kewl
rauch_jim (04/01/07 7:31:34 PM): are u kidding 13?
sad_cheyenne (04/01/07 7:32:00 PM): no im not kidding
sad_cheyenne (04/01/07 7:33:04 PM): that wat u look like
rauch_jim (04/01/07 7:33:10 PM): would u like to suk on this?”

Jim sends the decoy the dick pic across state lines at this point and then asks her immediately afterwards if she would like to perform oral sex on him. Jim is now guilty of committing at least 2 Federal crimes and there’s no way out for him, nor should there be. He was sober enough to recognize that she was too young and ask that she confirm her age before sending someone he thought was a child a picture of his shriveled dingus and ask her if she wanted to suck on it. That right there, just that exchange of words and images, is Solicitation of a Child and Transmitting Harmful Images to a Child. They had Jim dead-to-rights on those 2 charges 12 days before he hopped in his Aztec and drove to Highland Heights and there is no defense he could mount that would have gotten him out of that.

I still don't get why he started the interrogation wisely denying any statement the detectives made, was relatively terse and almost made sense.

It was as if he was getting drunk in the course of the questioning.

He was high on arrogance!

Everyone has done a good job explaining it already.

Rauch could have asked for a lawyer immediately but he talked and dug his own grave.

I think this has been discussed before. But Rauch talked himself out of not needing a lawyer.

I don’t give Tom that much credit. I think he got lucky when Jim said the yes/no, and Tom, being folksy, said I have one already. Without this it would have been a less eventful Kyne interview. Jim wouldn’t have said anything.

It's Nitchke.

Your sposed to spell right Dammmit!

I’m no lawyer, but I don’t think that argument would work. For starters, just because Jim drove while intoxicated doesn’t mean that he didn’t intend to have sex with someone he presumed to be a minor that night.

So THAT’S how his name is spelled! I should have known that you’d know the correct spelling.

Tell that to the guy getting Rutherfords info!