 |
| Meri Jane McCracken-Woods, convicted in 2014 of downloading CP |
Since 2008, Once Fallen has maintained two blogs about exposing trolls, vigilantes, and others who abuse sex offender issues for personal gain. AZ-Unites is one of them. The annual Shiitake Awards is the other blog.
I'm sure most regular readers of AZUnites is familiar with the Shiitake Awards, but for those who are not familiar, the Shiitake Awards is an annual Razzie-Awards-styled project where we vote on the dumbest sex ofender-related story of the year. There are seven categories, and one of the categories is "Everyday Zeroes," the category for everyday citizens who make headlines for doing something stupid related to sex offenders. Most of the time, it is a direct vigilante action, such as a guy harassing a registered person. However, there are times where people have been featured on the Shiitake Awards for trying to set people up for sex crimes.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/wife-who-used-child-porn-to-frame-spouse-gets-jail/
INDIANA, Pa. - A Pennsylvania woman convicted of downloading child pornography to frame her estranged husband must spend six months to two years in the county jail.
The Indiana (Pa.) Gazette reports 43-year-old Meri Jane Woods was sentenced Monday by an Indiana County judge who rejected her attorney's request for leniency and flexibility and to postpone the sentence until after the holidays.
A jury previously found Woods downloaded 40 images to the family computer, took it to police in August 2013 and blamed her estranged husband, Matthew Woods, for the material.
But when police examined time stamps, they determined the images had been downloaded more than two weeks after Meri Woods had her husband kicked out of their Clymer-area home with a protection-from-abuse order.
Woods continues to deny wrongdoing saying, "I only wanted to protect my children."
Last year, one of the Everyday Zeroes awards nominees is a woman from Clymer, PA named Meri Jane Woods (nee McCracken), who was convicted in December of downloading child pornography in an attempt to frame her husband for a sex crime. She is supposed to be serving a six-months to two-year sentence right now, but if the phone call I received is to be believed, she's out on bail pending an appeal.
No matter how she spins the facts, she's currently convicted of a sex crime. There was no word on whether we will see her on the public registry, but in the interest of fairness, people are on the registry for far less than downloading 40 images of child pornography.
So what does this have to do with AZUnites? Well let me explain. Yesterday morning, I received a call from an unknown phone number. The woman on the phone asks for the CEO of Once Fallen or something like that. Well, as the only worker of Once Fallen, I'm not only the president, I'm also a client. At any rate, this woman claims to be an attorney with some official sounding name (probably the infamous law office of Canwe, Cheatem, and Howe) and is allegedly representing Meri Jane Woods. She tells me Meri is on appeal and she wants my picture taken down because it is "private" and "only her husband" has a copy of said photo.
Ok, what people don't seem to realize is when you are married to someone and you give pictures to your husband, your husband owns the pictures as well. It is a moot point because after I had posted Meri's story on the Shiitake-Worthy Blog, someone emailed me and told me a picture of Meri could be found on Classmates.com, so I downloaded the pic above and posted on my blog. So, this "attorney's" claim that this photo was private and given to me by her husband was a truckload of bovine excrement.
I thought it was unfair that Meri's photo was not being plastered all over the news, because if her scheme worked and her husband was arrested for CP, his face would have been plastered on every news station for Bangor to Honolulu. This, in the interest of fairness, I became the first to release a photo of Meri Jane Woods from Clymer PA, convicted in December 2014 of downloading child pornography.
 |
| Meri's official mugshot is finally online, took long enough. |
Whatever the case may be, if I do face some sort of litigation, the law is on my side. I merely published a photo for informational purposes. After all, people have a "right to know" if a convicted sex offender lives in the neighborhood, right? Downloading CP is a sex crime, after all. Meri Jane Woods is on the public registry now.I guess the state police will be "prosecuted" for publishing her photo, too?
I'm no fan of the registry by any means. On the other hand, I'm no fan of a woman trying to set her husband up for a sex crime out of revenge for whatever reason they decided to split. Threatening a nationally known sex offender reform advocate isn't going to win you any friends, either, Meri and friends.
Expect to see her ugly face on the Idiots Registry sometime soon as well.
Or perhaps the Investigation Discovery channel will re-air the March 30th 2015 episode of "Who the [bleep] did I marry?" The episode entitled "Evil Beauty" features Meri Woods.
I will post any updates to this development to this story as it arrives.
