I have no interest in this Left vs. Right bullshit. However, I am interested in learning more about child molesters from Ricter, who seems to have more life experience dealing with them, than all of the rest of us combined. A couple years ago, when I mentioned how I understood the Islamic terrorist's mind better than any of you could imagine, I was asked to elaborate, and explain in more detail how they think. It made for a very interesting thread- at least until it was killed by a professional troll. Now I'm asking Ricter the same question I was asked then, but this time regarding child molesters: "So dude.... let's hear it Tell us how these psychopaths think. I want it straight, unfiltered, without bullshit media spin. Really.... im interested in hearing some details here. Spill it "
There's really not a lot to say about it Rearden. You talk to these people (some are women), you overhear a conversation, a case manager violates their privacy, someone in the community tells the tale, it's always the same except for a few cases: they themselves were abused. One instance that struck me was an offender who was raped repeatedly by an uncle for about 8 years. What struck me was that this angry, violent young man was incarcerated, along with some of the uncle's other boy victims, but the uncle himself was free. The police couldn't catch him in the act, and the youths were too ashamed, and to some extent intimidated by him, to testify. They'd been like that since they were 10 years old.
I'm not dodging, you're baiting. Dodging would be me changing direction, which I'm not going to do. I started on your hypocrisy in this thread, and that's where I'll finish. You put "Libs" in the subject line, and then later accused someone of trying to politicize the issue. You are good for my post count though.
False. You have yet to address the issue that this thread presents - that the Libs are in favor of incarceration and "studying" child predators. You've been going in the wrong direction all along. You're like the sailor who woke up in Hong Kong and thought he'd boarded the trawler for Vancouver. Wrong. You'll finish where you started - nowhere. That you aspire to having a high post count on ET is testament to your sad state. Zzzz wanna-be, that's you....what a lofty goal! ROFLMAO!
Uncle Kenny's dungeon inspires crackdown State pushes execution for repeat rapists of children Thursday, April 20, 2006; Posted: 7:29 p.m. EDT (23:29 GMT) HARTSVILLE, South Carolina (AP) -- Neighborhood teenagers called him Uncle Kenny, the wiry man whose trailer sat on a junk-strewn lot behind thick pines and a "No Trespassing" sign where the paved road turns to dirt. Kenneth Glenn Hinson, 47, had no children but seemed to treat his neighbors' kids as if they were his own. He would pile them into his pickup truck for weekend outings at Johnson Lake and roast marshmallows with them during sleepovers at his home. "My kids stayed down there, camped down there with him and cooked down there with him," said Donna McGee, who knew Hinson for four years. "Nobody ever suspected anything." They didn't know that Hinson had spent nine years in prison for raping a 12-year-old girl in 1991. Or that 15 years later, he would be charged with another crime so outrageous that South Carolina lawmakers would test the constitutional limits of the death penalty by proposing the execution of repeat child rapists. Two 17-year-old girls fled Hinson's property last month, saying he had taken them from a home, bound their mouths and wrists with duct tape and raped them in a shallow dungeon under a trapdoor in his tool shed. Hinson was captured March 17 after a four-day manhunt. State senate approves change in law A week after Hinson's arrest, South Carolina's Senate voted 38-4 to allow the death penalty for sex offenders convicted a second time of raping children younger than 11. Oklahoma lawmakers are considering a similar bill. Gov. Mark Sanford and South Carolina's attorney general, both Republicans, have endorsed the death penalty for child rapists. A state House committee has yet to take up the measure. Like most of the 38 states allowing capital punishment, South Carolina and Oklahoma reserve the death penalty for murderers. Only three states -- Louisiana, Florida and Montana -- have laws allowing the death penalty for sex crimes, and no such executions have been carried out since the U.S. Supreme Court let capital punishment resume 30 years ago. "There are a lot of people who would argue a rape of a child is tantamount to taking their life, because you deprive them of their childhood," said Jay Hodge, the prosecutor in Hinson's case. But "as a practical matter, I don't feel comfortable that the U.S. Supreme Court would go along with it." The Supreme Court in 1977 overturned the death sentence of a Georgia man condemned for raping an adult woman. It declared that execution "is an excessive penalty for the rapist who, as such, does not take human life." One rapist on death row The U.S. has one inmate on death row for a rape that did not result in murder: Patrick O'Neal Kennedy of Louisiana, convicted in 2003 of raping an 8-year-old girl. The Louisiana Supreme Court upheld the state's death penalty for child rapists four years before Kennedy's conviction. It said the U.S. Supreme Court ruled only on executions for rapists of adults, not children. Appeals of Kennedy's death sentence could force a new showdown in the nation's high court. "Anything less than the taking of a life could never justify an execution -- that's how most people read the Supreme Court decision," said Kay L. Levine, a law professor at Emory University in Atlanta. Rick Hoefer, Hinson's court-appointed attorney, declined to comment on the death penalty proposal or the case against his client. "I can't imagine any good coming out of trying this case beforehand in the press," he said Tuesday. On Hinson's four-acre property -- littered with discarded tires, broken furniture and bulging trash bags -- the alleged dungeon sits beneath a rickety shed. Investigators say he camouflaged its trapdoor with a concrete block. It was a chilly, crypt-like space, just 41/2 feet deep and roughly the length and width of a midsize car, with the floor and walls lined with two-by-fours. A single 75-watt bulb illuminated the space. "It reminds me of something out of a movie -- a real bad horror movie," said Hinson's niece Renee Faile, who turned him in during the manhunt after he came to her backyard asking for a glass of water and a cigarette. South Carolina's proposed death penalty change would not affect Hinson -- the alleged victims are too old, and the law could not be applied retroactively. http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/04/20/child.rapists.ap/index.html ----------------------------------------------------------- At least one state kind of gets it. But why should it be a "repeat" child rapist capital punishment applies to? Any sick animal that would rape a child ought to be put down after the first offense.
I think some of you guys are not thinking about this the right way. Most of these people cannot control themselves. They are mentally ill and should be treated as such. I would not be surprised if many of them commit crimes in the hope of getting caught so that their lives can be ended. Many of them know they are monsters, but if doesn't seem to help in abstaining from the heinous crimes they commit. The tragedy is that nothing good comes from these crimes. Everyone loses. The only good that can come from it is if after his death his brain is removed and analyzed by neurologists and other brain scientists. Sadly, we would be able to understand little and even if we understood, very little could probably be done to treat them since our current understanding of brain chemistry/physics/biology is archaic. In fact the bodies of all these criminals should be disected for possible correlates (do they have enlarged hearts or are any of their body parts oversized or undersized - do any of their body parts show damage - does his genome show an over/under abundance of a particular gene? etc, etc, etc?) In the age of massive databases, let's start putting these things to use in data mining. These people disgust me. But when my anger fades and I can think objectively again, all I can do is try to figure out a way to make things better. nitro PS - Most of these crimes are committed by men by an overwhelming margin. If I were doing research, I would start by understanding how testosterone (or lack of it in the womb?) shapes the brain. Probably obvious, but it seems like a good place to start.
Your compassion and interest in objectivity is indeed commendable, albeit misdirected. Once in custody, these wretches are constantly paraded in front of news cameras and their history of life's misfortunes are appear over and over again in the media. As time dims the horrific nature of their deeds, the constant media exposure of the 'poor' wretches difficult life elicits a public empathy in the same manner that a captor begins to identify with his/her captors. The raw horror of the deeds committed begins to fade. If the press gave equal time to pictures of the bruised, battered and disfigured little victems, this empathy might change. So ... go to a quiet place in your home ... sit in a comfortable chair ... close your eyes and empty your mind of all those packages you carry. Picture the face of a young child who has only known love, trust and protection from all adults. Recall those times that you've heard a child - as the result of a fall or a scare - scream with such terror-filled intensity that the sounds made the hair on your arms stand up. Now hold those thoughts. And now imagine how their terror wells from within as they realize that their 'new' friend is beginning to scare them ... how an uncontrollable trembling overtakes their body as scream from their depths for their parents ... how their screams of terror come from the very depths of their souls as they experience a pain they never new existed. And now tell me again about compassion and objectivity, about studies and understanding. I experienced these thoughts after my cousin was found bound to the tree that witnessed the final traumatic, terror-filled moments of her life at the hands of a man who HAD been studied, treated and released. Neither confinement, prison beatings nor the threat of death act as a deterrent, ergo no justice. Prevention prevails only when these predators are NEVER given the opportunity to repeat and that guarantee only comes from their death. Of course, I lean towards a slow, horrific, terror-filled and painful death ... but I lack your compassion and objectivity.
I think your interpretation of my statement is an exercise of broad literary license ... but perhaps I was unclear. I did not advocate abandonment of due process, but rather a re-examination of priorities when offering compassion and objectivity. However, following conviction, I will admit to advocating equality of mercy to the predator as was shown the victim.
In a perfect world, I would tend to agree. But ... the cliche speaks for itself. I think the rate of recivitism makes a clear statement of the results of the temporance, understanding and objectivity shown towards predators in general. You won't like this, but ... I was raised in a very ethnic neighborhood where crime was almost non-existant. Occasionally, some clueless malcontent would come in seeing an opportunity for an easy score. Most of those who were apprehended, experienced a rebirth that forever turned their lives around. I've no doubt that you and the ACLU would have frowned on the events that led to such rebirth, but I can tell you that no one feared a 3AM walk around the block. I look at the above and our current system as two extremes, neither of which offers everyone satisfaction. But somewhere in between there exists a formula that - albeit not perfect - works better than what we have now.