Darren Sharper Gets 9 Years in Prison for Rape

Darren Sharper is a retired NFL football player who has been charged with being a serial rapist. He’d go into bars and meet up with girls, slip a pill into their drink and take them to his home. They’d wake up in the morning only dimly aware of what happened.

Nevertheless, in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and New Orleans, nine women separately filed charges against him. A scandal about this is that none of these states had any idea that the other states had charges against him, because there is no database for sex crimes. And since single rape charges sometimes wind up as arguments about consent, rape cases usually remain local. Obviously this is an oversight that needs to be corrected.

The seriousness of this matter was only discovered when one state read about Sharper in another state in a newspaper, and from there it snowballed into what it needed to be.

Sharper pleaded guilty as part of a multi-state plea deal for crimes in Arizona, Nevada, California and New Orleans. He has been held in jail since February of last year awaiting trial, but finally there is a plea bargain.

As part of the deal, Sharper will serve approximately nine years in prison in total, and, after that, has agreed to a whole raft of limits on his behavior . He will be on parole for the rest of his life, he will be a registered sex offender, he can never consume alcohol again, can never use the internet to solicit women and, this is pretty interesting for a civilized society, has agreed to be brought into a laboratory if requested to do so by his parole officer, where doctors will conduct tests by rigging him up with a penile plethysmograph and then be required to watch videos of both coercive sex acts and non-coercive sex acts to determine the level of arousal in the penile area as a result. What is a penile plethysmograph? It looks like something from the 19th century. It has a small hood and electric wires.

Figure it out for yourself how it might work.

I did think that electric shocks might be part of this, but apparently they are not. Instead, if Sharper “fails” the penile plethysmograph test, he will have to go into sex therapy until, after numerous therapy talks with a psychiatrist, those forbidden arousal reactions cease.

Or something.