How About a Wi-Creep-edia?
The horrific tale around the resurfacing of a girl kidnapped 18 years ago who had been kept prisoner in outside sheds with the two children she had by her captor highlights how ineffective our criminal justice system often is. The ungodly creep - one Philip Garrido - had previously been convicted of kidnapping and rape! He was sentenced to 50 years in prison in 1977, but was paroled in 1988. Yes, he was on the sex-offenders list, but how polluted is that list with marginal cases like 23-year old guys having sex with 16-year old girls or cases of date rape (I'm not excusing those acts, but they're not creepy behavior in the "sexual predator" vein)?
A WiCreepedia would allow for tracking of anyone convicted of serious sexual acts. It could be abused to slander people and of course the predators themselves could quickly update their own info to cleanse or throw people off track. But at a minimum anyone who has abducted a stranger is almost certainly a continuing danger to society. There is no excusing an act like that - it is quite simply pathological, and its perpetrator almost certainly irredeemable. The existing list allows you to find a specific offender or find offenders within a specific jurisdiction. But we need one that allows searches by type of offense, age of victim, parole status, etc. If the citizenry could have such a tool, we might be able to flush out more of these unsolved atrocities.
A WiCreepedia would allow for tracking of anyone convicted of serious sexual acts. It could be abused to slander people and of course the predators themselves could quickly update their own info to cleanse or throw people off track. But at a minimum anyone who has abducted a stranger is almost certainly a continuing danger to society. There is no excusing an act like that - it is quite simply pathological, and its perpetrator almost certainly irredeemable. The existing list allows you to find a specific offender or find offenders within a specific jurisdiction. But we need one that allows searches by type of offense, age of victim, parole status, etc. If the citizenry could have such a tool, we might be able to flush out more of these unsolved atrocities.
posted by ziel | 8/28/2009 08:37:00 AM
5 Comments:
If we're going to do it, we'd better do it quick. Most such cases are likely to involve a kidnapping before 1992, when the violent crime rate and all forms of child abuse (except neglect) started to plummet. The recent case involved a kidnapping in 1991.
It's hard to imagine the victims living far into their 40s or beyond, let alone be able to adjust to society at that age. So if the bill to establish a Wi-Creep-edia took 25 years after some horrible incident -- like the legislation named after Adam Walsh -- most kidnapees would already be lost.
Then again, we already have a big database in place. But you can foresee lots of legal fighting before they could beef it up.
I suppose, but the numbers of these incidents are so low not sure how impacted they'd be by the drop in overall crime.
Here's a study of child abductions based on 1999 informattion. They found 115 of these types of abductions - they refer to them as "stereotypical" abductions because that's what most people think of when they hear "child abduction." And for that study period, only 4% were unaccounted for. So that's 4 or 5 per year. In how many of these cases are the children kept alive? If all of them were, that would be up to 150 still alive. But it's not crazy to think their might be a couple dozen out there.
All this aside, there should be a way to filter out the real creeps from the total universe of "sex offenders" and to have a better way to gauge just how creepy they are.
This is far worse than a temporary kidnapping for money. Garrido should be executed for this crime.
Apparently, this girl would meet customers of the family printing business at the door. Why didn't she escape?
She was scared. She knew he was nuts. She had every reason to believe that if her escape plan - whatever it was - did not work perfectly, he would kill her and her children - and don't forget she had children. Would she want to leave them in his hands? It seems that he more or less decided to surrender by bringing them all with him to his parole hearing - only then was she comfortable enough to tell law enforcement in a police station who she was.
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