Joey Dauben, One Year Later

So its now been a year since a jury convicted Joey Dauben of 3 counts of sex with a minor, and the Judge decided to stagger his sentence giving him a 30 year prison term which really is staggering.  It was not the end of Joey's life, but it was the end of his online life as he and we knew it.  No doubt he has now had to adapt to the new reality of prison life.  He is still trying to work the appellate process, but in all reality he isn't going anywhere any time soon.

The conviction marked the sad end to a life that got off track.  Joey had lots of enthusiasm for local politics, and he would no doubt be having fun covering hotly contested local races this year.  He had a zest for that and frankly its something that more people need to do, it served a purpose in the community. But he learned that his biggest reactions to his stories came from those where he made the most outlandish claims.  He enjoyed the spotlight and for him to stay in it, he had to continue to state wild accusations against elected officials and community leaders.  He would do this all on hearsay, rumor, or in some cases...pretty much made the entire thing up by connecting his own dots.

Joey also started to hang out with the wrong crowd as he got a little too close to some dirty gypsy cops in Bardwell and Combine.  They corrupted him and helped push him more down the path of everything is a conspiracy.  Then he teamed up with the infamous John Margetis, a member of Lawless America, and the man who spends most of his time attacking judges and officials with extreme slander.  Joey liked the limelight that came with this, even though it was decidedly negative.

He then decided that he had cracked the decades old murder case of Amber Hagerman.  Even though his theories were dismissed by law enforcement, he crusaded on with his claims to having found the killer as well as an underground child sex ring.  This eventually evolved into him getting involved in family court/custody issues and is how he eventually crossed paths with Bill Windsor and Lawless, although his conviction came before they could ever really work together.  Once Joey was convicted of sex with a child, Bill dropped him and moved on.

Unlike Bill, Joey was truly likeable as a person, and I do believe he really did mean well, at least originally.  He wasn't trying to deceive people he just never learned that there are two sides to every story.  His zeal and arrogance caused him to libel many people.  Thats the main reason this blog ever started was a way to give his victims and others a chance to tell the other side of the story that Joey ignored.  Joey missed his sister's wedding this year, among other things.  I hope for the day where a responsible Joey can emerge, one who has learned that you must investigate to get all sides of a story before printing something.  But even more than that, as the name of this blog implies, I hope Joey can move on with his life and realize he can't fix all the worlds ills, and instead he needs to focus on his own problems.  That is what separates those like Bill and the Lawless crowd, from all the actual adults in society.  Superman is a fictional character.  The real supermen and women in life are the ones that handle their own lives and families.  They realize that for them to even make a minor change for the better in just their own community, they need to put down the bullhorn and get involved with their community and try and change it from within.  You may not end up in history textbooks for that 80 years from now, but you will live a life that actually did something about your world as you knew it, instead of just complaining about it.