Vigilantes

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 11:09 am and is filed under Evil, Excruciatingly Correct Behavior. You can follow any responses to this entry through the comments RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Vigilantes”

1. Geoff says:
   

   I disagree with option two. A fifteen-year-old who molests a three-year-old is fundamentally broken in their brain. All the good parenting in the world can’t fix that.

   November 19th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
2. Geoff says:
   

   Then again, he did just kill his own fifteen-year-old son. Perhaps turning the gun on himself might not have been inappropriate.

   November 19th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
3. Hubbard says:
   

   Geoff—

   Killing your own son is such a crime, that I couldn’t imagine living with myself afterward. This is probably why I wouldn’t make a good vigilante: I’d have to punish myself later.

   November 19th, 2009 at 7:29 pm
4. Apollo says:
   

   One of the tragedies of our prison-based criminal justice system is that it makes option one not really that great in a lot of situations. Even presuming the 15 year-old wouldn’t be treated as a juvenile (a big presumption), the end result of reporting this guy to the police is him spending a few years in prison, followed by a lifetime of the bureaucratic hell of registered sex offender status. While that’s nothing I’d volunteer for, it ultimately seems an inappropriate treatment for someone so amazingly deficient in what we call “humanity.” The more tragically-minded among us might point out that Messrs. Pinkney were all to full of humanity.

   Having spoken with a few prosecutors about child sex abuse, the amazing thing isn’t how frequent this stuff is, it’s that for so long it was completely ignored. They told me that when they’re questioning jurors before sex abuse trials, they almost always have at least one potential juror, normally in their 40s or 50s, who says he or she was sexually abused as a child. One prosecutor told me of a time where an entire jury panel was disqualified because the questioning turned into something of a therapy session as six panelists, one by one, said that they had been sexually abused as children and had never told anyone about it. It’s only in the last twenty years that child sex abuse has been prosecuted with any regularity – before that, it was mostly not reported or swept under the rug. One might hope that some of those perpetrators were treated to vigilante justice, but it’s unlikely. But probably not very many. Even today, the percentage child sexual abuse cases that are brought to light is probably very low.

   November 20th, 2009 at 12:01 am

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>