Somer Thompson is now in Paradise. Executing the son of a bitch who killed her is not going to bring her back. But we should also talk about how to prevent this.
There are many ways to prevent this. The first thing to do is to repeal Jessica's Law.
Now, I'm for parent and community notification. If parents know where a sex offender is, they can tell their children not to go "near there", for their safety, since a sex offender lives there.
According to an AP story, there were 161 sex offenders living within five miles of Somer's home. Since the passage of Jessica's law in Florida, other cities in Florida have made it a crime for a sex offender to live almost anywhere else. They are forced to be homeless and there are some who are forced to live under a bridge in Miami.
Fine, if you do the crime, you do the time, IN JAIL! Some of these offenders are on probation or parole, and they have to work. Parents should be told where these offenders are located, but to force these, otherwise assholes, to live in rural areas, or even under bridges, would require these offenders to be bunched together, like in Somer's case, where she could still be kidnapped and murdered.
Jessica's Law wouldn't and didn't stop Phillip Garrido. He used a car to kidnap Jaycee Dugard. "Have car, will travel." Before Garrido was convicted for rape and kidnapping in 1977, he used his car to kidnap a casino worker in South Lake Tahoe, California, and took her to a storage facility to rape her in Reno in Nevada. If Jessica's Law was enforced in California back in 1991, it would not have stopped Garrido from kidnapping Jaycee.
Garrido could have kidnapped any other girl(s) anywhere. He could have kidnapped a girl in San Ysidro or Calexico. He could have kidnapped a girl in Yuma, Lake Havasu City, Bullhead City, Laughlin, Primm, Jean, Las Vegas, and he could have kidnapped the Governor's daughter in Carson City! He could have been anywhere.
Unless you chop off the offenders' legs, they going to move, and drive. By clustering them in a given area, it ain't going to stop them from comming any more crimes. To stop further abuse, it is generational. These molestors molest because their dads or other caregivers molested them. Until that stops, it won't.
Keeping parents notified will help. Clustering the offenders is another fascist knee-jerk tactic that only hides and exacerbates the problem, not solve it. Clustering them didn't help Somer, and it didn't help Jaycee.
It's time to repeal Jessica's Law, in memory of Somer.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Who says a registered sex offender is responsible for killing Somer Thompson? While there is that possibility for sure, one must keep in mind that recidivism for the majority of first time sex offenders is extreemly low, 3.5% according to the U.S. Justice Department.
ReplyDeleteOne must keep in mind that according to the same USDOJ that 93% of all sex offenses are committed by family members and those known to the family.
Yet, all we've heard from the media is "registered sex offender hysteria.
We don't know, what we don't know. So instead of the hype and hysteria, cooler heads must prevail and hopefully they will get this person and through our courts deal with him/her.
One thing for sure, only the person responsible for this should pay for it. Not the 50 some thousand Former offenders who had nothing to do with it.
One other note:
ReplyDeleteThe USDOJ also says that 95 percent of all new sex crimes are committed by those NOT on the registry!
we really need to focus on
1. Those who DID NOT KNOW their victim.
2. The VIOLENT offender.
3. The REPEAT offender.
If we did that as a society. Law enforcement could better supervise the most dangerous.
As it stands now, money, man power and resources are being wasted in having to track 100 percent of all sex offenders. The vast majority are low to no risk.
John Couey was a high risk repeat offender. Phillip Garrido, same thing. If you check out the rare but media driven hysteria, you will find that these cases were almost always in one or two of the 3 catagorys mentioned above. Yet we want to punish all. That is NOT the American way.
I kind of agree wth both comments. There sould be a thorough investigation of who murdered Somer. There may be 161 registered sex offenders, BUT there are some UNREGISTERED sex offenders, and of course, there could family members, out-of-state sex offenders lurking in Florida, and unknown first-time offenders, like the 15-year-old who killed that girl in Missouri.
ReplyDeleteI'm not advocating that Somer's murderer go immediately to "Old Sparky". He/she is entitled to a full and fair trial, and the battery of appeals that follow. Whoever is caught, the Police should always be required to arrest the right suspect, and collect all the evidence that should be used at trial. The last thing we need is a wrongly convicted suspect.