EDINBURG, VA – A 27-year-old Virginia man will be required to submit to a vasectomy as part of a plea agreement offered by Shenandoah County prosecutors after he crashed his Toyota while driving on a suspended license, then fled the scene, reported NVDaily.
The requirement “was primarily due to the fact he had seven or eight children, all by different women, and we felt it might be in the commonwealth's interest for that to be part of the plea agreement.”
The prosecutors say the controversial requirement had nothing to do with the case, but stemmed from their concern over the man’s history of sexual irresponsibility.
Jessie Lee Herald pleaded guilty to child endangerment, hit and run driving, and driving on a suspended license in relation to the December 23 crash, during which a three-year-old passenger suffered minor injuries. Police said he fled the scene of the crash on foot with the boy and took him home, then continued running to avoid the cops. A week later, he turned himself in.
On June 4, Herald accepted a plea deal sentencing him to one year and eight months in prison, three years supervised probation, and two years unsupervised probation. A major condition of the deal requires that he undergo a vasectomy within a year of his release from prison, and agree not to have it reversed until his probation ends.
Assistant Prosecutor Ilona L. White told NVDaily that the requirement “was primarily due to the fact he had seven or eight children, all by different women, and we felt it might be in the commonwealth's interest for that to be part of the plea agreement.”
She told the paper that concerns over Herald’s promiscuity had been raised at previous trials for other crimes he has committed in Shenandoah County, including hit and run driving, unlawful wounding, possession of illegal drugs, and obtaining money by false pretenses.
Herald’s attorney, Charles Ramsey, said of the vasectomy requirement, “Absolutely, it’s unusual. I’ve never been part of one like that before.”
The plea deal – and its justification by prosecutors – could prove controversial in a state that has faced heavy pressure in recent years to pay reparations to the victims of its eugenics-based forced sterilization program, which ran from 1924 to 1979 – the longest-running in the nation.
In 2002, then-Gov. Mark Warner, a Democrat, issued a public apology to victims of the policy, which sterilized those the state deemed “feeble-minded.” This catch-all descriptor was applied to an estimated 7,325 people during the program’s run, including those with mental illnesses, mental retardation and even epilepsy.
The program was also widely abused to target blacks and “undesirable” whites, especially poor rural whites. According to Edwin Black’s 2003 book War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, sheriffs would frequently perform “mountain sweeps” in which they would enter a rural area, round up those perceived as unworthy of procreation, and take them to mental institutions, where they were held captive and told their release was contingent upon agreeing to be sterilized.
A proposed 2013 law would have granted victims of the eugenics policy who are still alive up to $50,000 each in compensation, but the legislation died in committee over concerns that the state didn’t have the money to make the payments.