A former Florida police officer has admitted to forcing undocumented immigrants into having sex with him.
Via Free Thought Project:
Jonathan Bleiweiss, 34,
pleaded guilty to an array of charges last week, admitting to 14 counts of
armed false imprisonment, 15 counts of battery and four counts of stalking.
However, he avoided all of the charges with “sex” in them.
Most likely due to his
police officer status, this former Broward Sheriff’s deputy was given an
insultingly lenient plea deal. As part of that deal, Bleiweiss did not face
charges of sexual battery, and as such will not be required by the state of
Florida to register as a sex offender.
A group of approximately
20 undocumented immigrants alleged that Bleiweiss, harassed them, molested them
during pat-downs, and threatened them with deportation if they refused to
perform sex acts.
Eerily enough, just after
this officer was named Employee of the Year for his district, Bleiweiss told
the South Florida Blade newspaper that early in his career one of his
supervisors taunted him by calling him “sex offender,” for being openly gay.
However, the label, now
fitting, will not be applied. Bleiweiss was sentenced to five years in jail and
ten years of probation but avoided the sex offender designation altogether.
Undocumented immigrant
workers are often targeted by unscrupulous individuals as they have very little
recourse when trying to report crimes committed against them, because of their
“illegal” status. Bleiweiss likely chose this vulnerable group of people to
violate and abuse, for this reason.
In the end, Bleiweiss was
charged with arbitrary battery charges relating to patdowns he conducted while
on duty; nothing else.
Broward Public Defender
Howard Finkelstein called the outcome, “shocking and shameful to the whole
county.”
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