"Punishment Has Been Achieved"

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"Punishment Has Been Achieved"

Scenic Sandpoint, Idaho -- home to a ruling elite worthy of Soviet Russia. With those words, which are found near the end of an August 8 motion to dismiss a spurious battery charge against Sandpoint, Idaho resident Rita Hutchens, the author – Bonner County Chief Deputy Prosecutor Shane Greenbank – incriminates himself. Rita Hutchens is a tiny 57-year-old internationally respected quilt artist who has never committed a violent act against anybody. She was accused of “criminal battery” because she threw a ballpoint pen at a desk in the Sandpoint City Hall while doing research for a potential lawsuit against the city. Greenbank, whose flair for rhetorical exaggeration would strike a hormonal adolescent girl as excessive, accused Hutchens of “willfully and unlawfully us[ing] force or violence upon the person of Melissa Ward.” Bear in mind that this was not a case in which a pen was employed as a shank, as occurred in a previous episode here in Idaho, nor was the pen hurled like a javelin. It was tossed carelessly at a desk, which means that there was no criminal intent – an indispensable element of an actual crime. “There was no reason to touch her,” Judge Buchanan observed.

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