Interview with first person tried under Chelsea's Law, Joseph Cantorna

This half hour interview was on a local San Diego Station, and I hope to speak to the interviewer to extend this commentary.  It was an incisive interview, made all the more difficult by Cantorna's ill fitting dentures that precluded clear speech.  He is clearly both mentally retarded and delusional, both conditions interacting in ways that I wouldn't assume to be able to explicate.

The interviewer-reporter asked probing questions, gently but directly.  When unsure of what Cantorna was saying offered some options, multiple choice to overcome his speech impediment.  Cantorna was like a child, devoid of artifice and defensive self serving expressions.  He acknowledged his earliest offenses, with flat affect, neither pride or shame, just describing the way it occurred.  The reporter, by her asking and allowing him to speak formed a type of bond with him.  At the very end Joe asked, "How did I do?"  He wanted her to like him.

His crimes, based on both the record as described here, and his self reporting, were limited to touching, exposing and masturbating in front of children.  When asked whether he knew that this was wrong, the question seemed irrelevant to him.  He did what he did,  He accepted it, he went to jail for it, he spent most of his life in mental institutions, and that's just the way it is.

He talks about sons and grandsons, which may or may not exist.   At times there is pure fantasy, as when he answers to how many grandsons he has with "seven, six, five....."  Another time he describes his many sons as being shot in the head, and shows what happens with his hand forming a gun.

He appears clear about the immediate events that he was presently incarcerated for, even describing how he walked away from the psychiatric community facility, saw two young boys riding their bikes, and asked their age.  They apparently started a conversation.

He describes touching one of the boys on his butt, the one who he said was his grandson, but not the other one.  He described pulling down his pants to show them his penis, to demonstrate how he had no pubic hair, apparently because he had shaved it.   (has anyone checked whether this is accurate just for a measure of the degree of his delusions)    When asked whether there was anything else that he did to the boys,  he said there wasn't, nor has anything more been alleged for this incident.

He has no sense of the notoriety of his being the first man indicted under Chelsea's law, which he had never heard of.  When asked whether he was afraid of going to prison for a long time, he responded, "Yes."

Nathan Fletcher, the sponsor of Chelsea's law commented on Cantorna's indictment, saying that it proved how important it was to have Chelsea's law passed expeditiously.  



It turns out that he will not face this punishment.  After months of the D.A. preparing for trial, on the first day the Judge ruled that Cantorna was not competent and remanded him to the the  Mental Health agency for sequestered treatment, not that different than what he has known all of his life.