A convicted child molester who has been in a prison or mental hospital cell since 1993 gets to stay in the latter, following a decision by a Santa Ana jury this week.
But former Anaheim resident Richard Scott Kindred, 50, gets to take with him “honors” of having posed for the ugliest police mugshot of the week.
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Kindred was convicted in the 1980s of molesting two boys under age 12 and sent to prison the first time for three years. He was slapped with a 16-year prison stretch in 1993 for molesting a third boy. He did that time, too, but has been kept at a state mental hospital under California's sexually violent predator's (SVP) laws.
He won an Orange County Superior Court hearing this week that has him blaming his former bad behavior on his upbringing and swearing to never molest kids again. But Deputy
District Attorney Michael Carroll argued Kindred remains a threat to children because he has not acknowledged he is a pedophile and refused to seek treatment. He'll always be attracted to little boys, Carroll said of Kindred.
It took the jury less than a half hour Tuesday to agree with the prosecutor that Kindred should remain locked up. He'll stay in a mental hospital until he is no longer deemed a threat.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.