Holding on, with hope, composure
Michele Clute has never held a gun. Instead, she has held her composure with a white-knuckle grip I admire. She held it when her 7-year-old daughter confided that a neighbor, Mark Magallanes, had raped her repeatedly over a two-year period.
She held it when Magallanes was convicted, but then allowed to enroll in the state's Special Sex Offender Sentencing Alternative (SSOSA) program, and given just six months in jail.
And Clute held it together at the Legislature, where she unsuccessfully pushed for a bill that would have given citizens access to the names and hundred-block addresses of sex offenders. She also helped with a new law that will increase penalties for sex crimes against children.
All of these things were worthwhile.
But they were really the Next Best Thing to seeing Magallanes behind bars.
Seems Magallanes violated the terms of his sentencing not once, but three times by buying Penthouse magazine, watching pornographic television, and viewing Internet porn that included minors.
On their own, those acts may not seem enough to land a man in jail. But they are all part of Magallanes' modus operandi as a sex offender — and clear violations of his sentence.
"A deal's a deal," Clute told me before yesterday's hearing at the King County Regional Justice Center in Kent.
In her speech to the court, Clute reminded Superior Court Judge Brian Gain of all this, quoting from the transcripts of Magallanes' 2000 sentencing:
"If you violate any of those conditions ... you will find that I have no tolerance for failure," Gain said then. "You will serve 160 months in the state prison."
Magallanes: "Yes, your honor."
Said Clute: "Geoduck smugglers get 14 years. ... But a child rapist gets six months in spite of violations."
When his turn came, Magallanes said that SSOSA had taught him "how to be a human being."
"All I can do to make amends is to live a life of recovery and relapse prevention."
A corrections officer said Magallanes had passed a polygraph last May, and that there had been no known violations since January, when he completed the SSOSA program.
So Gain was forced to weigh his words against a mother's hope, and a man's potential. He released Magallanes from SSOSA, but ordered that he remain supervised, but free.
Clute got up and walked out, furious, then composed.
"My daughter is proud of me and proud of herself that our situation has been used for the good of other children," she told me.
As for her daughter? She won't open her bedroom window, despite the summer heat, for fear that Magallanes will kill her, like he said.
And she has strung a cowbell on her bedroom door.
Nicole Brodeur's column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Reach her at 206-464-2334 or nbrodeur@seattletimes.com.
She would string more than that.