Sober Thread: 3 women missing for 10 years found alive.

Why is it that every time something bad happens people abandon their ideals and think with their emotions? Regardless of what happens to this guy and how good it makes the general public feel for a couple of days before they forget that this ever happened it isn't going to change what he did to those three people. He deserves to be punished, but hopefully we're better than stooping to that level an advocating that kind of treatment of people, isn't that what separates us from him? Just like I said in the Boston bombing thread, it isn't hard to see that once you allow that kind of treatment for some people who may even rightly deserve it that it could easily spread from there. We'd already be abandoning the whole no cruel or unusual punishment premise entirely by doing so, why would people hold against allowing those kind of punishments to more and more criminals before it got out of control?

I agree that the media digging up this guys' past is just more evidence of the shit reporting we're subjected to. The news isn't about getting out the news, we all know this, they are a business there to make money mostly off of other peoples' misfortune.

 

You are right. And prison is basically a fate worse than death-- at least an unflinching trip into hell. He's going nowhere but there, where you either experience daily violence and paranoia, or go insane from isolated loneliness. Either way, he rots.

 

While I do agree that Cult has a legitimate argument about society eventually degenerating into chaos if we stoop to this demented mother fucker's level, all I can think about is my loved ones and if some degenerate fuck head did this to them.

What those girls were subjected to were (To use your own words) a fate worse then death, where they experienced daily violence and paranoia. And sexual abuse, and being treated as an object for this guy's twisted desires instead of as a thinking, feeling human being.

One of the girls suffered 5 miscarriages. He aborted the pregnancies by starving her for 2 weeks and then repeatedly punching her in the stomach. If you ignore the whole kidnapping and raping thing, that previous sentence should make you ill if you're even remotely capable of empathy.

This is one of the crimes that I think it's within the bounds of reason to throw out our evolutionary compassion. Fuck this guy. I don't want justice, I want this asshole to suffer the same way these girls and their families suffered. He certainly didn't give a shit for his victims or their families, so is it wrong that I wish our justice system would invoke a punishment commensurate with his crime?

 

I feel like society as a whole is fed up with seeing these types of people getting caught committing terrible crimes and then still being given rights and fair treatment that they obviously didn't provide for their victims. People like this asshole should not have any rights whatsoever because of the nature of his crimes. Some people are just too far gone and no amount of jail time is going to fix it or be enough to compensate for what these women and their families had to go through.

I don't know what the answer should be, but I know that our system is too lenient and forgiving when it comes to terrible crime and the punishment it doles out.

 

See, that's what makes us better, that we afford those rights. So I can't really ever agree that we should think with our rage boners and throw the rules out the window.

 

Bull fucking shit. You mean to tell me that if one of those girls was your daughter/sister/niece/friends you'd be spouting this hippie we're better then that crap? You'd be out for fucking blood and vengeance and you know it.

 

Really? I think our system is way too strict in the grand scheme of things. We pretty much put zero focus on rehabilitating prisoners, it's purely about punishment. Weird how in countries that focus more on rehabilitation they have much smaller rates of recidivism. We have a ridiculous number of people in prison, more than China and they have three times more people than the US. Granted comparing these kind of things between countries can be tricky given different legal and socioeconomic situations as well as many other places around the world being much more homogenous than the US which can lead to increases or decreases in offenses committed and prosecuted. No matter how you look at it, I think we're doing something wrong, either we're allowing conditions to exist that force people to resort to crime, make crime more beneficial than playing by the rules, or or the US penal system is fucked.

Looking at the smaller subset of "terrible crime" as you put it, you and some other people seem to want a whole other class of trial and punishment for perpetrators. You would have to come up with legislation that defines what constitutes these terrible crimes and what punishments would be applicable when and a whole other mess and your emotional approach that dictates the existence of this new category would prevent that from ever happening. Thankfully our system doesn't punish criminals in the manner that random people see fit at the time of the incident. You all are going to forget that this shit ever happened in a couple of months, do you REALLY feel that strongly about it? I'm from where this happened and I barely care. What happened to those women was terrible and they deserve justice, but I just don't get the emotional reaction these kind of things provoke from people who are completely detached from the situation. Do you just imagine that it's your family that this happened to rather than the actual victims and go from there? I'm not trying to be a dick or act like my way of thinking is superior, just for the record, I'm genuinely trying to understand where these extreme feelings come from because I just don't get it.

Just because some people are prone to emotional overreaction doesn't mean everyone is, but you may be right, I don't know, I've never had something of this magnitude happen to myself or anyone I care about. Victims can be prone to wanting ridiculous punishments for petty crimes, not just horrible things like what this guy did, so where does it stop?

 

Yeah, let's try and rehabilitate this asshole. Maybe he'll only kidnap and rape one girl next time.

Do you know why China has a lower rate of prisoners? Because it's a communist country and if you disagree with government they roll over you with a god damn tank.

You're from the Cleveland area and you barely care. Good for you. Perhaps you'd care even less if it happened even further away. There are a number of families that all sorts of fucked up right now because of this cock sucker. But that doesn't concern you. You'd rather buy into the myth that people are basically good. I've got some shocking news for you my friend.

There are monsters walking among us. They don't care about your general beliefs of people being good or the possibility to rehabilitate them. They don't care about people like me that would as soon shoot them as look at them.

Think about the last 10 years of your life. Remember the highs and lows. It's a long time isn't it? Now imagine that those 10 years was composed of being tied up and raped every other day. Not a pretty thought is it? That's the reality this fuck imposed on 3 human beings. He didn't give a fuck about their rights. He didn't give a fuck about anything but himself, and I find it rather appalling that you are even trying to defend/blow this off.

Your idea of a perfect world is a wonderful ideal, but it ain't going to happen.

 

I'm not saying the justice system should try to rehabilitate this guy specifically, I'm just saying in the grand scheme of things a bigger emphasis should be placed on rehabilitation instead of punishment even with people who commit serious crimes, but especially with prisoners who will eventually be released back into society. We send people to prison as punishment and you know what they learn in prison? How to be better criminals and they go out and commit more crimes. What the fuck do we expect when these people rot for years and then we just throw them back into society. You could say they don't deserve any better than that and I could understand where you're coming from, just don't be surprised when criminals remain criminals because they were given no other choice.

The China thing is starting to get a little off topic, but this isn't the cold war anymore, dude. I know admittedly little about China, perhaps you know much more than I do, but from what I understand it's a far cry from the China that was seen at Tienanmen Square. The point I was trying to make is that the US penal system is fucked.

I'm not trying to be edgy by saying I don't care, I'm just pointing out that to this particular incident I have a closer connection than most people on this board, but I don't understand the outrage. I get that what happened to them is horrible beyond imagination and they deserve justice, but why are you (and anyone else for that matter) getting so worked up about something that has zero relevance in your life and the chances of something even remotely similar happening are astronomical. It's the same thing with the Boston bombing or school shootings. People freak out about these things like it's going to happen to them next, kind of like a hypochondriac except instead of diseases you have tragedies. And lets not pretend like most people care for these three women, I meant care as the fascination with the whole story. I don't buy into anything like that because making such large generalizations is retarded, and good is in the eye of the beholder anyways, but I can say with confidence that most, no, almost everyone aside from a handful of individuals who I will probably never cross paths with and even if I did I probably wouldn't be their victim would not kidnap me and keep me as their personal sex slave for ten years.

Yeah, see I don't imagine stuff like that because it's pointless and buying into media fearmongering, and I don't have a good enough imagination. I've never been a prisoner nor have I been raped so I really have nothing to extrapolate from, and pretending like you can and that you somehow understand what those three women went through seems ridiculous to me. I'm not defending anything the guy did or try to blow it off, I'm simply saying we shouldn't compromise some basic ideals simply because you and some other people have some weird obsession with tragedies, and that maybe your line of fearing everyone you meet or that you are going to fall victim to someone like him isn't good for your health. I don't believe in an idyllic world, but I do believe if we compromise the few ideals we do have like not torturing prisoners and giving accused people due process so that you can feel better about something bad happening to someone else it will spread and hurt people whose actions do not deserve that kind of treatment and eventually will hurt people who are innocent.

 

I get that a lot of you feel the penalty for this guy is going to be inadequate. We could torture him for ten years and then execute him for the babies that died in the womb. That would probably be closer to true justice than anything that's going to happen to this guy. Let's say we did that or whatever punishment you feel is appropriate, and then to the next one, and the one after that. At what point does it stop being satisfying and start becoming almost as sickening as the crimes themselves? I guess some of you feel like blood can pay for blood, but I just can't see it that way.

Trust me, in China they are way worse at catching criminals and cops are more than happy to take bribes. You're also about 100x more likely to be sentenced to death there than here in the states. Let's just not compare our legal system to China or anywhere else. I'm sick of hearing about what they do in Canada and Europe as if them preferring it is any reason we should want the same.

 

This is what happens to him: he can't be killed but he'll go to jail until he dies. That means while living in pure, unabashed shit and fear, where everybody is screaming his name day and night that they're going to decapitate him with a hacksaw and skull-fuck him afterwards he dies from:

1) Being beaten or stabbed to death, maybe thrown from a high railing and which is more often than not worse than a primed execution
2) Rotting, basically from misery and shit health, coming down with heart diease, AIDS or cancer and dying alone in a prison infirmary with nobody you know having any clue.

... I can't think of anything more satisfying. He lives in misery and dies in it. Then, worms eat him. Dead is dead.

 

I don't see how "he should get a fair trial" and "he should spend the rest of his life in a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison" are mutually exclusive.

 

These statements are equally ridiculous.

 

All of what Village Idiot said, plus I can't really condone the accused (assuming he's found guilty) being raped by fellow inmates, I don't find it possible to be okay with one rape and not okay with another considering, seems extremely hypocritical especially considering this guy has been accused of rape. I'm not really down with the whole "eye for eye" style of punishment. That's not to say I would protest it happening, but I wouldn't think that it is right or just.

 

In one of these examples, Kampf is complaining about a person promoting the adaption of a facet of a culture said person admittedly knows little to nothing about.

In the other example, Kampf is complaining about an argument made based on first-hand experience.*

Two very different things here. I should hope you're better at the professional use of bromides than you are avoiding the argumentative.

* In the majority of cases. Disclaimer inserted for the existence of those who know nothing about a restaurant yet praise or deride it, in which case Kampf's example statements become equally rational.

 

The statement "I'm sick of hearing about the way other countries do things" on its face is an insular, provincial worldview that shouldn't be given much credit. Granted that the subject was started with the glorification of China's judicial system, which is far more ridiculous than the sentence I clipped from kampf's post. But, come on:

I admit that I walked into this thread having not read all of it, so I wasn't thinking as narrowly as the rest of the topic, and probably too early on a Sunday morning. But the idea that you can look at the way other parts of the world do things and evaluate their effects and learn something and apply that to how things are done at home really that ridiculous? Is there nothing about the way things are done in different parts of the world that are better than the way they're done here? Me, I wish we had more traffic circles and fewer restrictions on the public consumption of alcohol, like in Europe. But I also wish that Europeans didn't have the annoying habit of blowing their noses loudly in public because that's fucking gross. And the fact that society here at large prefers being in public without having to listen to other people clearing out their sinuses is a good reason to at least consider the possibility that they should want the same as we do.

 

I don't think you're wrong about it being worthwhile to evaluate other societies' customs and laws, and then take those into consideration while looking back at home. What I was referring to was blind ethnocentrism that ignores the difficulties of implementing change, or the desire to adopt some foreign solution without realizing what that actually entails. Also, just because something works elsewhere doesn't mean that's what another country wants. People have trouble relating to how gung ho Americans are about their freedoms, whether that's speech, court, gun control, etc because we often pay costs they wouldn't consider. This is starting to veer way off topic, but my point was that how another nation interprets justice isn't necessarily relevant to the United States.

 

Yeah, but I (the guy saying "he should spend the rest of his life in a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison") am presumably not going to be on the jury. "Innocent until proven guilty" applies to the judge and the twelve jurors, not the peanut gallery.....unless of course we're all supposed to actually believe that OJ didn't do it.