Too gruesome to imagine
The sentence of two years on probation handed to the Middletown teen who killed the mother and baby groundhog bothers me. This was a really despicable case: The suspect not only shot the baby with a paintball, but then shot the mother 10 times and - here's where I get really grossed out -dragged the mother into the woods and set her on fire, listening to her screams. He bragged about it in school afterward.
That's really sickening. His saying it was "an isolated incident" doesn't warm me up at all. The one incident was so nasty, I just can't understand somebody enjoying - and bragging about - something so cruel.
That's really sickening. His saying it was "an isolated incident" doesn't warm me up at all. The one incident was so nasty, I just can't understand somebody enjoying - and bragging about - something so cruel.
3 Comments:
Clare, you raise a good point. I think the judge understood that jail for this young man would entail beatings by other inmates, possibly repeated raping, and bad influence. Jail punishes, but it destroys lives in the process. And they call it "reformation" or "corrections" or some such nonsense. The thing that baffles me is, for over 200 years, we've only used four punishments: execution, jail, (occasionally) fines, and (lately) community service. Execution is going out of style, and fines are levied on criminals who have means. That leaves jail or community service for the vast majority of cases. A country as imaginative as ours should be able to devise other alternatives. The Constitution bans cruel and unusual punishment, but it does not ban harsh punishment. Why not public humiliation, such as the old stockades? Why not whippings? We need to come up with more suitable punishments -- anything but jail.
The Judge is this case was Patricia Delbueno-Cleary. She was a longtime public defender before becoming a judge. Little surprise that she is, now, notoriously soft on those she sentences.
New Jersey should follow the lead of most other states and elect our judges. An elected judge never would have sentenced this kid to 2 years probation and 30 days of raking leaves in the park (community service).
He sounds like a future Al Queda leader in the making.
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