Governor Who Cut Funding for Sexual Assault Victims Has Son Who Was Charged With Sexual Assault

On Friday, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed a law that bars state funding from going to any organization that provides abortion services. This means that Planned Parenthood, which doesn't use state money for abortions, will be deprived of funds they would have used to provide all manner of sexual health services, including services used by victims of sexual assault — STD tests, pregnancy tests, and the Morning After Pill, for example. The defunding of Planned Parenthood would be a crappy, callous move on its own, but it seems especially hypocritical coming from Brewer — her son, Ronald, has been a patient at the state mental hospital for the last 20 years after he was found not guilty of kidnap and sexual assault by reason of insanity.

According to the Arizona Republic in July of 1989, Ronald Brewer allegedly broke into a woman's apartment, slapped her several times, and committed sex acts on her. After his 1990 indictment, his mother claimed that Ronald had "decompensated," which means that although he'd been functioning normally before the attack, his state deteriorated. His lawyers argued that Ronald didn't know, at the time, that what he was doing was wrong, and a judge agreed, committing Ronald indefinitely to the state's hospital, where he still lives (although he's free to leave with staff or with his parents). Just days before Jan Brewer was sworn in as the state's governor in 2009, Ronald's criminal records were sealed. His case is one of only four cases that were sealed in Maricopa County in 2009, out of 40,000 total criminal cases.

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