With all the DNA testing going on and the resultant exonerations of people who have served, in some cases, ten, fifteen, twenty years in prison (and sometimes on death row), it is not unusual to see a DA hunker down and insist, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the man is guilty, guilty, guilty!
Like the University of Mankato HR staff, they refuse to take responsibility for the massive damage they have done to an innocent man. It's human nature. It's a part of human nature that often does more damage than any other trait, because many of these people will stomp over anything and anyone to try to prove that they didn't recklessly destroy a man's life on the basis of evidence that any intelligent person could have read differently.
Todd Hoffner was a very successful football coach at Minnesota State Mankato. They gave him a cell phone, a Blackberry. One day, his children, girls aged 4 and 9, and boy 8, came downstairs in towels fresh from a bubble bath (which they had taken together), and demanded he record their performance with his video camera. The towels came off and they danced and played as young children do.
There are actually people in this world who think that children this age running around naked, dancing, and playing, is deviant in some way. I can't tell you just how sick I think these people are. But I think these people gravitate towards positions of authority: they really think they need to run other peoples' lives, make decisions for them, and ruin them, if necessary, to further their own egocentric power lusts.
When Todd Hoffner's cell phone broke, he took it in to the IT Department at Mankato and asked them to recover any photos and videos from it before replacing it. This they did. When some anonymous tiny little smidgeon of an IT technician saw the video, he freaked and called the afore-mentioned authorities, who called the police. Hoffner was escorted off the field in the middle of a practice. He was arrested and charged with making child porn.
Not everybody out there is crazy. Though the prosecutor and the University were absolutely determined to save our society from this terrifying threat to public morality, a judge quickly threw the case out. Sometimes you are more amazed at good sense than at hysteria. I am amazed. She saw exactly what I think any rational person would see: young, innocent children playing, naked. There was nothing pornographic about the videos at all.
The police seized Hoffner's computers at home and found nothing.
Todd Hoffner's wife, not surprisingly, ridiculed the charges. After all, it was she who put the kids in the tub together in the first place, naked. She believes the children have a healthy, natural, playful attitude towards their bodies. Many intelligent people believe that.
Hoffner, in an interview with ESPN said this: "You make a simple mistake and it turns your life upside down". He's wrong: he didn't make a mistake. There was not a thing wrong with what he did.
The University human resources department appears to be terrified. They don't act terrified in public-- well, yes they do: they have drawn over themselves a cloak of secrecy. They suspended Hoffner for using the company phone to take personal pictures (no word on the results of their investigations into all of their other staff to see just how many of them have also broken this rule-- I'll bet some HR staff themselves have broken it). Then they fired him for unstated reasons.
I believe they don't have any reason to fire him except for this: they look like complete idiots. They look like unspeakably stupid hysterical barbaric irrational zealots. And they know it. There is only one way they think they can rescue their reputations: by pretending that they found something else.
And thus, on an NPR site, in the comments, someone says, explaining why they fired Hoffner after a judge found him innocent, "they must have something else: do you think they are stupid?"
Yes, I do. More than ever.