I read this headline and thought, not a bad deal – Mother Gets 3 Months for Hitting Sex Offender with Baseball Bat. That is, until I read the article and learned the guy hadn’t been anywhere near her children. He moved into the neighborhood, sent out the required postcards, and then she shows up at his door, bat in hand. A lot of sex offenders evade the requirements to send out those notifications, and this is one reason why. She’s lucky she ONLY got three months.
The article doesn’t specify the sex offender’s crime, but sex offender doesn’t necessarily mean rapist or pedophile. Prostitutes are also categorized as sex offenders. Statuatory rape where one person is sixteen and the other eighteen can get you listed as a sex offender. But even if this guy were a pedophile, if he paid his debt to society and has been released, he is entitled to a chance at a rehabilitated life. As a parent, I understand that protective instinct. But this was misguided and criminal.
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The article from the local news said he was a category 3 sex offender, which was explained to be an offense toward children. I guess he had talked to one of her daughter’s the previous summer. No reason at all to go after the guy with a baseball bat.
While I find sexual predators to be disgusting I often wonder just where they are supposed to go. I have to admit I don’t want one as my neighbor just like everyone else but I don’t see having them live in a group under an overpass (like they have been in Miami) as the answer.
We had a sex offender in our previous neighborhood. A woman. Her offense was against another woman. Goes to show you can’t count on stereotypes to pick them out either.
As far as I’m concerned, once you get out of jail and off probation/parole, you should receive the full rights of citizenship. In the Mosaic law they didn’t even have prisons, but today, we imprison 1% of our population. And then we deny rights to those who make it out of prison. Did you know that if you plead guilty to misdemeanor domestic assault, you lose permanently the right to bear arms in self-defense?
With regard to serious sex offenders (i.e., child molesters, serial rapists), we shouldn’t let them back into the community if we really feel they are dangerous. We should either kill them (my preference) or keep them in prison for a longer duration. Thankfully, many states have lately enacted harsher laws toward child molesters and such.
And obviously, any harsher terms for “sex offenders” should only apply to certain types of criminals. The broad brush of including statutory “rapists,” exhibitionists, etc. is absurd. Statutory rape should arguably not even be a crime, and if it is a crime, it definitely isn’t a serious one. Streakers, likewise, are disturbing and annoying, but not terribly damaging.
Regardless of what type of sex offender they are — once we let them out, they should be normal citizens, with at least some reasonable chance for repentence and leading a normal life. I remember once when Bill O’Reilly suggested that we shouldn’t let sex offenders work at locations like McDonald’s, which serve kids. I just thought, Wow. You know how hard it is for an ex-criminal to get a job, and yet you want to start denying them fast food jobs? Brilliant.