Dad Catches Pervert Molesting His Child and Administers Dad Justice

You can't call this a "nice story," given that the child was molested and undoubtedly will bear at least some emotional scars from that.

But there is something reassuring when justice comes, whether administered by God, the courts, or a Kid's Dad.

When police asked the Avenging Dad if he had used weapons in the beating, Avenging Dad said Yes: My foot and my fist.

Apparently when the cops peeled this monster off the floor, he admitted he'd been molesting the kid.

So Avenging Dad pounded some Truth into him, too.

At the link, Allah discusses the law, and whether the Dad could be brought up on charges. Don't worry, Allah doesn't want that to happen and of course does not expect any prosecutor to do so.

But this points out an infirmity in the law to me. If the just outcome here -- that the Dad is allowed to beat this guy up, even though technically the law forbade it (given that at the point of the beating, he was not stopping a serious crime in progress; the pervert stopped when caught) -- requires a prosecutor to ignore the law or pretend the law doesn't exist, it's a bad law.

We are a nation of laws not men. The law should not require human beings to ignore parts of it to spare a popular defendant (nor should it allow human beings to alter it to go after an unpopular defendant -- which is what I think happened in Mississippi, in the Thad Cochran's wife's nursing home matter).

The truth is that it is silly to pretend human beings have a perfectly functioning, expertly timed on/off system for violence. The law is pretending that we do with its dictate that violence stop the moment a lawbreaker is no longer committing a serious crime.

But we don't.

So prosecutors have to pretend that this guy was afraid that the molestation might continue, if not for the beating.

There should be, in the law itself, a caveat that there should be some tolerance for what would otherwise be called extra-judicial punishment if the violent response occurs a very short time after a very serious crime which the reasonable person would call both emotionally overwhelming and a serious enough provocation to justify it.

Some would say this is a license for people to commit acts of violence as pure retribution. I can't argue with that -- that would be the effect of the law. There would be some excessive violence that would be excused away due to such a caveat.

But isn't that the system we have now, except unwritten, unpoliced, and unacknowledged?

There's a lot of room for mischief when we rely on secret understandings and "hidden law" to correct the absurdities of the law as written.

It's ridiculous to claim that the law demands that this Dad just sit there and calmly dial the police as he looks at this pervert with his pants down at his ankle, and it's injurious to our system of laws to rely on the discretion of men -- with their biases and bigotries -- to decide when the law will apply as written and when it won't.*

* One source of trouble for such "secret understandings" may occur when the parties are of different races-- that often sparks off racially-aligned anger.

I assume in this case that both the Dad and the Pervert were black, because, in America, as in most of the world, most molesters prey on their own race, and most violence is committed against people within one's own race, and so forth. (In addition, the pervert seems to have been a guest in the Dad's house; this society is still largely self-segregated, so it just seems likely to me that both parties were black.)

But what if they were different races? And what if the dad had taken one punch too many and put the guy into a coma, or killed him?

And what if the pervert, despite having done something terrible, could be portrayed as an otherwise sympathetic figure?

In that case, how would the prosecutors justify not applying the law as actually written?

The decision would again not be made on the law-as-written; instead the decision would be made based on which tribe's Racial Partisans got their troops out the quickest.

So the decision would be made on political grounds.

These factors aren't present in this case (I assume), but this is the sort of mischief I'm talking about. Certainly such cases are, sadly, fairly common.

It just seems to me that the law written down on the books should be the same as the law actually applied. If there is a difference between the law as written and the law when it makes contact with the enemy (that is, the actual world), then the written law should be altered to conform with actual practice.

I wrote something similar about a case in France when a jeweler shot jewel-thieves armed with guns and who had beat him to compel him to open his safe.

He was prosecuted.

Why? Because he only got his gun after the robbers fled, and shot them literally only seconds after the assault/robbery, as they fled down the street.

The law should be written to make sense to the common man, not the exceptional one. Perhaps an exceptional man places so much value on the life of the man who just beat him, threatened him with a shotgun, and stole his fortune that he would rather let a fleeing robber escape than fire a shot at him.

But the common man doesn't feel this way. And the law should demand a basic level of good behavior, not a heroic level.

posted by Ace at 05:44 PM

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