You get what you deserve?

[thecreeper]

http://web.mid-day.com/news/world/2005/june/112450.htm

A man who raped a Spanish woman's daughter was let out of jail on a short 3-day pass and taunted the mother about it, asking her "how she was" and apparently pissed off the wrong mother. from the article: "Shortly after, the woman walked into the bar, poured a bottle of petrol over Soriano and lit a match. She watched as the flames engulfed him, before walking out."

She was later captured and was cheered on by a crowd. This begs the question: is her vigilante justice justified? The man surely was a scumbag and the who 3 day pass thing seems a bit shady, but he was convicted of his crime and served several years in jail. Yet, in a way a lot of people feel that this is very justified and I really don't know how to feel about it. I believe she should be punished, but seriously, who fucking taunts the mother of a girl you raped? He had something bad coming his way after that.

[Mike]

Street Justice is not justice. Watch one of her family members or her get messed up in the future from one of this guys friends, or something.

A very young Abraham Lincoln addressed the Young Men's Lyceum in St. Louis Missouri, roughly 20 years or so before the outbreak of the Civil War (I think it was 1838), after a gang of people hunted down a black man who had committed a crime, hung him, and burned his body. Though justice was served, there was a small outbreak shortly there after, and more people ended up being apprehended and died because of it. Interestingly, though, that would be the man who suspends habeus corpus ... but whatever.

And the kind of people who taunt the mother of the girl that they raped ... are the type of people raping girls in the first place.

[thecreeper]

i don't feel bad for the guy, but i certainly don't want everyone taking the law into their own hands. sometimes vengeance feels good, but to what end?

[johnny]

She was later captured and was cheered on by a crowd. This begs the question: is her vigilante justice justified?seems to me she was just stooping down to the rapist guy's level. rapists and murderers (or was it only attempted murder.. did the guy survive being lit on fire??) are equally useless to me, so they can go ahead and send that woman to jail.

[Plain Old Jane]

if the guy was THAT much of a dick, he was gonna get killed anyway at some point, people (I use that term loosely) in prison who step on toes find themselves shivved. Yes, vengeance feels good, but usually its not worth the after effects. She's just as bad as he is now, and tho some people will tell her shes not a bad person for it, friends and family and such. They're prolly doing it more in fear than in love now.

IMHO, She's a fucker. Murder is never justified.

[thecreeper]

you know what bothers me about it? she didn't shoot him, stab him, or something quick. she doused him in gasoline and left him to burn. she wanted him to suffer and to know who did it. before he died, he probably knew that he had made the biggest mistake of his life.

she probably got what she wanted out of it too, and if i was in the exact same shoes, i don't know if i'd be a better man and let it stand either. at the same time, i'm not about to go around killing people.

[malta]

I won't contend that what she did was right, but if I was there and I saw it happen, I'd figure he got what he deserved.

[GT2000]

Oh yeah, self-vigilence isn't exactly right...but, on the other hand, if something like that ever happened to my kid, I wouldn't exactly be able to let it pass either if they walked by later on and taunted me on the subject.

[teensupernothing]

okay. subject i suppose hits a tad close to home so let's add some insight.

my mother beat the hell outta my dad. didn't exactly light him on fire, but... it was not a pretty sight. i thought, even though it happened to me, that it was wrong for her to do, because even though, yes, it's her daughter, it didn't happen to her.

now, had the girl lit him on fire... i would've thought it okay.

[Mr Biglesworth]

It feels very natural to be swayed to cheer for the woman, to sympathize with that need for vengeance, and the kind of justice being served by the act. Indeed, it is a kind of justice, and I disagree with mike that it's 'no justice at all'. It's simply not the form of justice that fits our Western society. This is not to be relativistic, but rather to be flexible. Merely the fact that we can all sympathize with the woman and the cheering crowds, at least a some level, shows that it is a form of justice. Of course, it is not (in our society) state-sanctioned justice, which you, being the delightful conservative that you are, would place as the pinnacle of justice. However defining justice as 'that which the state apparatus sanctions' is a relativism of its own. Once court sentences prove to be ineffective or unbalanced, the true definition of justice becomes detached once again. I can appreciate the need for respect for the institutional apparatus of justice, however justice is something that originates in humans, not in institutions (just as religion comes from humans, not the church), and the obscuration of this fact clouds the true form of justice. whatever the hell that is.

Mind you, that is not an argument for the woman. I think that your view on justice, mike, is of a higher order than the impulse of the woman and the crowd (see, not relativistic). However it is a fact that the day to day going ons of ordinary people do not consistently reflect and live up to the high values endorsed constitutionally. This is bad in many respects but it also holds the whole system together on a micro level, the thousands of tit-for-tat occurences of justice that happen in our daily interactions.

My $1.24

[testtubebaby]

My $1.24

damn, that canadian exchange rate is a bitch