It seems that Dane County District Attorney Brian Blanchard has decided to charge one-time faux-"abducted" University of Wisconsin student Audrey Seiler with two misdemeanor counts of obstructing an officer. [read the complaint (pdf)]
I think that DA Blanchard made a mistake in charging the two offenses in the exact same way, and I think that Immanuel Kant would agree.
One of the counts is for a false report that was filed on Feb 1, in which Seiler alleged that she was knocked unconscious by a blow to the side of the head. The second, identical, charge is for the week-long incident begining March 29th in which Seiler staged her own abduction - for four days Seiler garnered national attention (CNN, FOX) and triggered an outpouring of emotion from not only the Madison community but from the entire nation. Hundreds of volunteers flocked to the city to join in the search, and thousands of dollars were raised to aid the search effort. Residents were not only afraid to leave their homes but they were also afraid in their own homes. After four days, when she was found, Audrey Seiler concocted a bogus story about being abducted by a non-existent person (police sketch here) and helicopters with thermal imaging cameras were flown in from as far away as Illinois to aid in the search for the "suspect." A few days and $100,000 later, Audrey Seiler finally admitted that she made the whole thing up, largely because she felt that her boyfriend was not paying enough attention to her.
The complaint sheds light into a few other areas of the case - for instance, the fake-abduction was certainly premeditated. In addition to purchasing duct tape and a knife to use as props before staging the act, Seiler took other, more elaborate steps. For instance shortly before being abducted, Audrey Seiler created a sign reading "Audrey and Heather's room" and hung the sign on the outside of her apartment door, seemly for the sole purpose of offering an explanation to investigators as why to her apartment was targeted. (Her explanation: "The 'attacker' must have chosen our apartment because the sign indicated that he would find two women inside.")
Without getting into a debate over the morality of charging a (possibly) "mentally ill" person with a felony, isn't it at least logical that the two crimes, vastly different in scale, warrant vastly disparate charges? Isn't it immoral to charge these two crimes the exact same way?
Posted by jkhat at April 14, 2004 12:59 PMRegardless of what you think about the differences in significance between the Feb 1 incident and the March 27-31 incident, both of the charges relate to the more recent incident. Count #1 was for lying to officers on March 31 immediately after she was found (claiming that the "bad man" was in the marsh) and count #2 was for lying to officers during interviews on April 1.
There we no charges related to the Feb 1 disappearance.