Sicko-Garrido - Who dropped the ball on this one?

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http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/09/01/california.garrido.monitoring/index.html

Although there has been lot's of coverage on this story, I haven't seen it here at Sorcerers. Talk about a major screw-up! Opinions?

 

All of us dropped the ball.

 

Probably T2, my heart goes out to those girls, all 3 of them and every other victim who suffers that type of fate. It makes ya wonder with everything we try to do, to make everything right for everyone, are we stretching ourselves to thin here in the states? Take a look at all the social programs we have added over the past 30 years, all of the laws passed to help protect victims like these. I know we must try, i think we should never stop trying, but we need a tighter grip on the enforcement and I don't see that coming, even in this aftermath.

 

Isn't it understood by now that sexual predators are not like normal people and never will be. If you can't lock them up forever, then the death penalty should be considered.

 

Well, one of the problems with this is that this guy wasn't released recently, but more than two decades ago. What we commonly understand now and what we knew back then are two very different things.

Still, I think the first call to the police about people living in his back yard should have included, y'know, an actual search of the back yard! Even if it means going to the neighbor who called it in and looking out the window/over the fence, it would have shown enough for further investigation.

 

Where my 1st impulse is castration followed by immediate cauterization for this sicko, I know that is not possible, but I sure hope he rots in a cell for a long time....

 

I'm not sure there's an awful lot that can be said really. It's absolutely horrendous and the man's a monster. What more can you say?

It's only a few weeks since I was reading an article about the US's system for registering sex offenders. Basically it was saying that the US has the most draconian laws of any country by a mile as a result of politicians continuously introducing tougher laws to make them appear strong on the issue. The effectiveness of these is highly questionable though, as the Coombe guy in the article above was saying. The sheer number of people on registers mean the police can't monitor them properly. And the threshold for getting on seems ridiculous. A 17 year old woman involved with a 16 year old boy or a bloke who indecently exposed himself by urinating in the street may have done something that I wouldn't condone but are these people really potential threats to the public? It seems crazy that they're exposed publically and have all kinds of restrictions on what they can do. At the same time the police have to give these people just as much attention as the most vile rapists.

I'm not aware of any country that has a good system for dealing with people like this. And of course you can never be sure about people until after the fact. Still, at the very least people deemed a danger to the public should not be released. That should be a precondition of release before considering whether they've served the number of years on their sentence.

 

In this case, I believe the offender used an "I was high on LSD for years" defense and apparently got clean and was eventually released early. So he had to have been evaluated at some time during his incarceration. He must of fooled them.

 

I agree with Deise about the monitoring thing, and I've made that point in discussions with other people before. In my opinion, if it isn't a violent crime (non-consentual sex of any kind, kidnapping, etc.) or pedophilia, it doesn't need to be monitored. Now, the pedophilia thing can be a little blurry. Is there anything wrong with an 18-year-old and a 17-year-old? What about 20-17? 25-17? 35-17? 18-16? 18-15? Where do you draw the line? Still, if the charge is nothing more than statutary rape or public nudity or something, I don't think a life-time of monitoring is really all that necessary.

 

NOG - every single state has specific rules for what age ranges are allowed and what age ranges are not allowed. Having served as a juror in such a court case, I can tell you how the law is currently written in Maryland, and while the exact age ranges vary from one state to another, all states have them.

In Maryland, you cannot consent to sex unless you are at least 13. If you are under 13, whomever had sex with you is accused of a sex crime (presuming, of course, that the offender is at least 13). If you are at least 13, but under 16, you may only consent to sex with someone who is within four years of your age. (So a 14-year old can conset to sex with an 18-year old, but not a 19-year old.) Once you hit 16, you can consent to sex with whomever you please.

So in all the examples you listed above, every single one of them is A-OK in Maryland.

 

This is what burns my butt. Bleeding heart criminals' rights idiots tell us that long term incarceration is a viable alternative to the death penalty for pieces of crap like this guy. They then talk about these wonderfully long sentences that keep us safe from criminal filth. Well, I don't buy that crap anymore. When the bleeding heart math goes like this:

50 = 25 = 8

It's utter and complete lunacy crap. I don't give a flying eff about the statistics on parole or any of that nonsense. Tell Jaycee Lee Dugard that the system works. Tell her family that lost her when she was 11 years old.

50 years should bloody well mean 50 years. And if that sort of long term incarceration is too expensive, then kill the raping bastard, but don't tell me that it's an isolated incident and there's nothing to worry about.

I have no faith in our feel good, hug a thug legal systems here in North America. Victims' rights should always trump criminals' rights. Public safety should always trump criminals' rights. As it stands, is it any wonder people are buying guns to protect themselves when it is made clear time and time again that the government cares more about the criminals than it does the victims? Did anyone even consider the feelings of Katie Callaway Hall, the woman he raped in a warehouse, when they let this slimeball out after a pathetic, paltry 11 years? Where's the justice in that? They basically told her "your rape is only worth 11 years of punishment."

I envision my three little girls when I read stories like this. I wish that our governments would care more about them and their potential than the potential and rights of those who would kidnap and rape them.

 

Damn right LKD, I couldn't agree more...GIVE 'EM TO THE PARENTS! Seriously, if these whingey gits couldn't take the cop out punishment that they've been given then let the parents of the kids they've hurt have them. Their sentance wouldn't last as long!!

It's like the two kids that tortured Jamie Bulger to death. They've been released and given new identities and new lives even though they murdered a toddler. The bleeding heart social workers say that they have served their time and they were just kids who didn't know any better but if they didn't know any better, how come they went to such lengths to cover up what they did?

The lot of them should be killed and none of this poncy lethal injection stuff. Should be an eye for an eye

(Ooooh, don't get a mummy started on this!)

 

Shoot 'em all. If you take away someone's most innate right (the right to their own body), then you deserve nothing less than evisceration.

 

As for Garrido, they ought to lock him up forever, or lock him away in a loonie bin. The difference is marginal. If they want to execute him, fine with me. Let's just be clear about one thing: Garrido's punishment can never be made an equivalent of the harm he caused. Any attempt at that will fail.

As for the girls, I wish them all the best, and that they will be left all the time they need to recover and face their new lives and reunite with their family, without media hassling. They got enough trouble the way things are.

Still: The 11 years Garrido previously got for rape are a considerable punishment, and are far from lenient. He got out, three years early, and obviously wasn't rehabilitated. Eight years in jail are also a considerable punishment for rape.

Deise made an IMO quite thoughtful comment. It is not only so that with ever harsher laws and ever more convictions the police has a very difficult time with following up and checking on offenders. In many ways we see here a basic malady of America's criminal justice system, with the result that America iirc has the largest prison population on earth.

It is no miracle why. Punishments in the US often are draconian. Sentences for more than a hundred years - punishments that the culprits never will sit out anyway - are no rarity. Ever harsher laws overcrowd the prisons, and when you lock up pizza thieves for life because of the three strikes rule, the pizza thief takes a place of another criminal who did something far worse than robbing children their pizza. Yet he got life but Garrido got 11 years for rape? Or think punishment for drug related offences - locking someone up for dealing Marijuana worth ... $350 - for 26 years? That's 15 years more than Garrido got for rape, for selling four effing ounces of pot? It suggests to me an inability or unwillingness to distinguish the unimportant from the important, and the dangerous from the not so dangerous. The prisons can only hold a finite number of inmates. In light of that, one would think that common sense would suggest to preserve the finite resources for actually dangerous people or real criminals. Not so, apparently.

It's a preposterous situation. IMO, the resulting dysfunctionality is the price of posturing for more toughness mainly from the right, expressed in its purest and most asinine form by Mitt Romney during the Republican primaries: Double Guantanamo! I don't see the case of Garrido as one of inexcusable leniency of letting him out three years early. It is more complex than that.

 

Yep Rags, your right. One problem with the inconsistent laws here are they are varied from State to State, unlike many countries that have a universal law for the whole shabang. It does make it look tainted. But each state has the right to make these decisions, that's why we live in the state of our choosing here in the US, because it gives us choices. Unfortunately, you have to take the good with the bad.

 

I agree with everything you said, save this. The left is more or less equally complicit. With the exception of death penalty legislation, the majority of our often contradictory criminal code has been passed with bi-partisan support. When liberal California passed proposition 184 by ballot initiative back in 1994, it was passed with an astounding 72% of the vote.

While I am willing to agree that right wing posturing has a lot to do with the situation, I would contend that its influence is far less direct than you seem to imply. It is most assuredly the right pushing for these measures most of the time, but they don't have any trouble getting the left to support them; in fact, no real opposition comes from the left at all. No US politician wants to appear "soft on crime" come election time -- this is doubly true for Democrats, since they are already perceived as such by much of the electorate.

 

Granted, Drew.