3564 Bits

Friday, July 6, 2012

If you don't know, it doesn't hurt to ask. It does hurt if you don't.

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The Supreme Court recently ruled that life sentences (which some states mandate for certain crimes) for young offenders (below 18, I believe) is unconstitutional, being "cruel and unusual punishment", on the theory that someone that young is heavily externally influenced.  They may have had rotten upbringing, terrible adult models, a life of hopelessness, bad peer pressure which they are too young to resist, and so on, which must be taken into consideration.

Yeah, ok, I can see where they're going with it.  And yes, a lot of kids who did heinous things can still grow up into responsible adults with the right positive influence.

However, the ruling scares me because some of those kids are unredeemable.  They're already broken well past any chance of repair.  The thought of their being turned loose scares me.

I'm thinking of kids like those two in their early teens who kidnapped a toddler from a mall in England, and tortured him in multiple creative ways before finally killing him.

Who could torture a toddler?  There's something more wrong with those kids than just bad influences.

I do hope that all the Court shot down was state mandates, not judges' discretion. 

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Similar topic, some guy (18 when he committed the crimes, so the above doesn't apply) has been sentenced to an aggregate 130 (or maybe 135?) years after being found guilty of a series (7, I think) of armed robberies.  His buddies in crime took the plea-bargain and testified against him.  They each got much shorter sentences.

The guy thinks it's very unfair, because, after all, "it's his first offense!" Even his idiot lawyer is saying that.

Uh, no, you committed at least seven armed robberies (who knows how many more), discharging the gun at least twice, and were found guilty of all of them.  I figure that's at least seven offenses.

It's just the first time you got caught.

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 I don't know if everyone sees the same thing when they watch videos on YouTube.  On my screen, I see a column of videos on the right that seem to be related to the one I'm watching - same topic, same creator, same keywords, whatever.  The top video in that list is a "paid distribution" video.  Someone paid a bunch of money to get prime position on the recommended list.  It's not related in any way to the one I'm watching.

For the past very long time, it's been Mormon videos.

Someone is paying a truckload of money to get me (us?) comfortable with Mormons.

I wonder why.

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Well, it's summer, and we're getting news stories about kids and hikers lost in the woods/desert/mountains.   Some kids have been lost for days, with hundreds of searchers looking for them.

(An interesting aside - a little girl had wandered away from her family's campsite.  Hordes of searchers, all male.  Two women wanted to join the search, but were told no, that they wanted only trained search parties familiar with the terrain, so the women simply set out on their own.  The child was found by the women.


Why?  Because the child had heard the men calling her name, but hid when she heard them because she had been taught to be afraid of strange men.  She was afraid of being abducted.  She responded to the women.


Story from the "Free Range Kids" website.)

Here's what I don't understand.  Howcome they don't use tracking dogs?  Tracking dogs are used to locate criminals all the time.  Seems like finding a kid in the woods should be a snap.  Just start from the kid's bed or wherever they were last seen, and go.  But you almost never hear of that.

Yeah, ok, there aren't a lot of dogs trained for it (although almost any dog can do it once they know what you want so I don't know why there aren't a lot), so one would have to be flown/helicoptered in.  But hey, a lost kid! 

Here's a story of how a dog can follow a trail for miles in intense heat, picking out the one trail from hundreds of overlapping trails, with the least sniff of the target scent.  Amazing.

If my Nugget ever gets lost, I want a dog on the case!
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