The US state that is planning to bodily castrate youngster rapists

The temperature outside is well into the 30s as Delisha Boyd sits at her desk in New Orleans, one of America’s most humid cities, and explains why she’s just sent the political thermometer soaring.

Ms Boyd, a member of Louisiana‘s House of Representatives, has sponsored a law that has just made it the first US state to allow the surgical castration of rapists.

From August, judges will be able to order that anyone aged 17 or over convicted of raping a child of 13 or under should undergo the physical removal of their testicles.

Unlike chemical castration with drugs, which is ordered following some rape convictions, this procedure would be devastatingly permanent.

And so it should be, says Ms Boyd, who is herself the product of child-rape. She understands the effect of rape on its victims — and knows, she says, the absolute necessity of doing whatever it takes to prevent the perpetrator doing it again.

Her bill has been widely applauded by Louisiana’s Republican majority and derided by their opponents, who say this ‘barbaric’ new punishment would, given the track record of the state’s justice system, overwhelmingly be applied to black men.

So it is all the more striking that Ms Boyd is both a Democrat and black.

The 55-year-old believes her own mother was repeatedly violated from the age of 13 by a family friend who was twice her age — and that she, Delisha, was the result.

‘My mother was only 15 years old when she gave birth to me,’ she explains, her voice catching with emotion.

‘My ‘sperm donor‘ [she refuses to call him her father] was 28 at the time.’

Delisha Boyd was born in 1969, four years before abortion became legal in America thanks to the Supreme Court‘s landmark Roe v Wade ruling.

She does not know if her mother would have chosen to abort her given the opportunity, but Ms Boyd can say with certainty that she never recovered from the ordeal.

‘No one was looking out for her, she didn’t have any psychological help or whatever,’ she tells the Mail. ‘She turned to drugs and alcohol. She was 28 when she died of cardiac arrest from drug use.’

Her mother had struggled to bring up her two children, a boy and a girl, leaving Delisha — who didn’t learn for years what she had been through — gripped by a simmering anger towards her.

It’s not difficult, then, to understand Ms  Boyd’s fury towards men who rape children or why she has championed a solution fellow Democrats condemn as ‘medieval’.

Steamy Louisiana is in the Deep South, a Bible Belt heartland which, outside the Democrat-voting and mainly black city of New Orleans, is largely white and Republican, a place where every other building seems to be a Baptist church.

The legacy of slavery, say critics, lingers in a state still sharply divided on racial lines. Louisiana has one of the country’s highest incarceration rates, one of the worst records of wrongful conviction and its inmates are disproportionately black.

Plantation owners once routinely castrated male slaves and the prospect of such a punishment returning has appalled some of Ms Boyd’s black Democrat colleagues.

Echoes of the past are everywhere. Even today, Louisiana forces prisoners at Angola — the notorious State Penitentiary dubbed the ‘bloodiest prison in the US’ — to go out to the surrounding fields in gangs and toil in the crushing heat.

Ms Boyd co-authored her bill with State Senator Regina Barrow, another black Democrat. But few others in their party have supported them and the measure was made law thanks to the votes of Republicans. The bill was then enthusiastically rubber-stamped by Louisiana’s Bible-thumping governor, Jeff Landry, a former police officer.

Opponents of the measure from politics and academia — all from the Left — have been drawing comparisons with Nazi doctor Josef Mengele who, among his many sadistic crimes, conducted castration experiments on concentration camp inmates.

Fellow Democrats have made it clear they believe Delisha Boyd and Regina Barrow have done their opponents’ work for them. (Ms Barrow had originally proposed that even people convicted for disseminating child pornography face physical castration — a measure which did not become law).

It’s not as if Louisiana’s Republicans need much help.

Backed by strong majorities in the State Senate and House of Representatives, Governor Landry has been throwing himself into America’s raging culture wars, apparently bent on making Louisiana the most God-fearing state in the union. Earlier this month, Landry, who only took office in January, signed the first law in America making it compulsory for the Ten Commandments to be posted – in a large, ‘easily readable font’ – in every publicly funded school classroom. ‘If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses,’ he said.

Opponents say the Ten Commandments measure flouts America’s constitutional separation of church and state and they are threatening to challenge it in the courts.

But presidential contender Donald Trump says that Louisiana’s approach should be adopted right across the US. 

Governor Landry, meanwhile, supports Louisiana’s near total ban on abortions and classified two medications used to induce them as ‘dangerous substances’ whose unauthorised possession is punishable by up to five years in prison.

The governor has added the use of nitrogen gas and electrocution to the state’s deadly arsenal for conducting executions. He has lowered the age at which criminal suspects can be prosecuted as adults to 17 and adults are now permitted to carry a concealed handgun without a licence.

Only a handful of countries around the world use physical castration, including Pakistan and Nigeria. 

Delisha Boyd, who has a daughter and granddaughter, has no time for claims from her own party that she’s a dupe of Landry or that she is somehow betraying fellow black people.

‘I don’t want to make this about race or party,’ she says. ‘I am a woman first and foremost, with a child. This is about doing what’s right to protect our children.’

She cited the arrest last month in state capital Baton Rouge of a 51-year-old man accused of raping a 12-year-old girl. The suspect had already been convicted of a similar crime involving a five-year-old in 2007.

‘Imagine if a judge had sentenced him to castration,’ she says.

‘I tell people: ‘Close your eyes and think of your child at five’. There’s nothing you can do to make [such] children’s lives normal again.’

While critics have opposed physical castration as a breach of America’s constitutional ban on ‘cruel and unusual punishment’, Ms Boyd insists it’s the five-year-old victim who had suffered the real cruelty.

‘The fact that we’re even discussing the cruel and unusual punishment of a rapist and not the victim is insane,’ says Ms Boyd, who would happily see child rapists face the death penalty.

If her opponents say castration harks back to the terrible days of slavery, she, too, points to the wrongs of the past — in this case the way black women were treated in the Deep South.

Between the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865 and the end of racial segregation a century later, no white man in the South was convicted of raping or attempting to rape a black woman, even though the crime was common.

It’s not just the brutality of physical castration that has attracted criticism, however, but the potential for miscarriages of justice — more so given that such cases can hinge on the sometimes unreliable testimony of children.

Some opponents have questioned whether emasculation will even be effective.

Also called orchiectomy, surgical castration involves the physical removal of the testicles, which produce 95 percent of a man’s testosterone — the primary male sexual hormone which is the main determinant of sex drive.

Yet the small amount of testosterone still produced by the adrenal glands located above the kidneys could be enough to allow some sexual function to remain in some cases. One German study suggested that 18 per cent of offenders who chose to be castrated were able to have sex 20 years later.

Critics also complain that castration could prove ineffective because many rapists are driven by the desire for power over their victims rather than by hormones alone.

Louisiana and a few other American states already allow courts to order chemical castration, using drugs to stop the production of testosterone. This is rarely used, however, and even when it is, the effects are only temporary.

Ms Boyd accepts that physical castration won’t stop all rapists re-offending but believes such a drastic punishment would be worthwhile if the measure prevents even one sex assault on a child.

And she is keen to emphasise that Louisiana isn’t ushering in an emasculation free-for-all. The operation would only be carried out at a judge’s discretion, and a court-appointed doctor must first agree that the prisoner is medically fit for major surgery.

Given Ms Boyd’s new law doesn’t come into force until August, as yet, no one has been sentenced to physical castration. There are precedents in Louisiana, however. In April, Glenn Sullivan, a 54-year-old who repeatedly raped a 14-year-old girl, agreed to the removal of his testicles as part of a 50-year sentence.

In such cases, as with surgery for testicular cancer, the patient is anaesthetised, a doctor makes an incision just above the pubic area and the testicles are removed through the opening.

Offenders in Louisiana will be allowed to refuse the operation, but they must then serve another three to five years in prison, possibly with hard labour.

While that may sound tempting, those acquainted with the prison farm at Angola — named after a slave plantation that stood on the spot — say otherwise. Angola is where rapists are sent and where the prison museum exhibits horrific pictures of the violence inmates have inflicted upon each other.

Authorities on Angola suggest that child abusers might accept anything, including castration, to get out as soon as possible.

There’s no doubting the issue is divisive, but Representative Boyd says she’s had more calls from local people who support her bill than from those who oppose it.

The Mail certainly found conflicting views as locals around the Louisiana digested the news of the state’s latest hardline response to crime. I met Doris Runcie and daughter Natalia Gaylord — accompanied by three small children of her own — filling up at a garage in Baton Rouge.

‘I say ‘Yeah’,’ said Mrs Runcie to the idea of castrating rapists. ‘For the same reason I tell my daughter to neuter her stupid dog. It would be so much happier.’

She continued: ‘Someone who doesn’t act like a conscientious being should definitely be treated like an animal. There’s no reason why a child rapist should be allowed to do it again.’

Her daughter, Natalia, said she worried castration might seem too much like ‘vengeance’. But she accepted many Louisianans are ‘pro-life’ (anti-abortion) and  ‘we’ve got to do more to stop rape’.

In New Orleans, however, a 40-year-old black writer called Flint Sutton was dismayed.

‘Castration’s such a final decision — it’s way too punitive as it’s irreversible,’ he said.

He believes that in such cases the burden of proof would have to rise substantially to ensure innocent people don’t suffer wrongful and irreversible punishment: ‘It’s not like you’ll easily be able to say ‘Oops, we made a mistake’.’

Not that he was particularly surprised by the new measure. ‘We’re in the South and we do retain a Biblical perspective,’ he said.

Drive through the swampy bayou country of the Mississippi Delta, and that perspective isn’t hard to find. Keith Corley, a 54-year-old jukebox technician in Baton Rouge, is a former Texas prison guard. He believes castration is a ‘grand idea’.

He had sympathy for other criminals who might offend because, for example, of straitened circumstances. But Mr Corley considered child rapists to be ‘some of the scummiest and most evil people in the world’ and was frankly ‘amazed that they’re allowed to keep living’.

What happened if a convicted person later turned out to have been innocent, I asked.

‘There’s nothing in this world that’s perfect,’ he shrugged.