Tori Stafford Murder Trial

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He didn't actually try to prevent it, he heard about it an hour or so after the attempt and then did it. I'm not particularly friends with this guy and so i'm not going to defend what he did, but I see a large degree of difference between something like this and other forms of unprovoked violent offense. I'm certainly not going to cry about a bunch of would-be rapists and I see no reason to be against rehabilitation strategies in crimes like this that, while are still crimes, don't automatically condemn someone to being irredeemable filthy scum. At least in my mind. Besides the statistics on how many rapists go to jail are really bad, I believe the number is out of every 100 rapes only 12 will lead to an arrest and only 9 will actually get prosecuted. For this reason I can somewhat sympathize with someone who, in an understandable fit of rage, decided to take matters into his own hands. I'm not saying it was right, but it's not worthy of absolute condemnation IMO. People like that may not be violent in everyday life and something like this could very well be an exception that deserves a more merciful approach that focuses on rehabilitation rather than punishment for the sake of revenge.

 

Different degree, same neighborhood. Both are violent crimes. Personally I'd prefer that my Uncle Freddy the tax fraud lawyer served his time with Bernie Madoff rather than Carlos the Jackal. And the rapist street-justice-bringer is closer to Carlos than Bernie in terms of danger.

 

And shouldn't different degrees offer different punishments relative to the severity of the crime? We already do this to an extent, murder has different degrees depending on the circumstances. Obviously both are violent crimes but they do not offer the same amount of justified certainty of repeat offense. Someone who does something violent just for the heck of it can't be rehabilitated with the same chance of certainty that someone who does something in the heat of the moment after a terrible crime has already been attempted. All i'm advocating is a rehabilitative approach when there is a somewhat reasonable chance of it working. Our repeat offense rates are terrible compared to other parts of the world where more rehabilitative approaches are attempted.

 

I thought we were just talking about where different offenders get housed, per LKD's remarks.

Seems to me that otherwise, different sentences determine the punishment. e.g. your guy will be out in a couple years, while the child rapist/murderer will be (in a perfect world) there forever. That your guy and the child rapist get stored together in the meantime is a bi-product of the fact that they're both violent criminals, as opposed to Bernie Madoff and Uncle Freddy the tax lawyer.

I think that making 'semi-serious' prisons for offenders who may-be-kinda-crazy-but-are-probably-decent-fellows-at-heart-as-long-as-they-haven't-been-drinking-and-you-don't-piss-them-off is going too far to accommodate them. By that standard we'd have hundreds of tiers of facilities, as every crime and every offender are unique. Most states and even the federal prison system don't have the resources for that.

btw, apologies - I realize this is a Canada thread and not a US thread.

 

Oh, that's why he went to prison. It was after the fact. At the time he did it, his girlfriend wasn't in danger of being raped. If he had been there when the initial attempt was made, he could have probably beat the crap out of them and not even been charged. It's totally different when your gf is no longer in immediate danger, and you go to where the guys were with the premeditated purpose of beating the hell out of them.