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Federal Appeals Court Says Sex Offender's Computer Ban Unfair
crimeandpunishment writes "A federal appeals court says a 30-year computer restriction for a convicted sex offender was too stiff a punishment. The man, who was caught in an Internet sex sting, had been ordered not to own or even use a computer." The D.C. Circuit Court's opinion in the case against Mark Wayne Russell is available as a PDF; slightly longer coverage from the Courthouse News Service.
assuming he *is* guilty, he knows about "stiff punishments"... :P
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I bet he wishes he hadn't done that now, huh?
The guy tried to turn a 13 year old girl into his personal whore and banning in from using the computer is 'unfair' ...
WHAT
THE
FUCK
is wrong with this world?
Unfair would be cutting his balls off and raping him with a broom handle until he could taste splinters only to find out that he didn't do it.
There is nothing 'unfair' you can do to him. Nothing.
What if it was your daughter? Your wife? Your son? You'd still think it was 'unfair' to ban him from a computer? Seriously?
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Most people look at things like homosexuality and pedophilia the completely wrong way.
Are you really comparing homosexuality to pedophilia?
Yes.
What's your point? I made one about both for an analogy. You may not like the way the analogy connects the two because one's obviously very bad.
Jesus said "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."
No. He didn't. It's not in the earliest copies of the Gospel of John.
It's a good parable. It gives a good moral. But it's a fabrication. Although, a fabrication that even Jesus would have approved of.
The bible was written at least a century after the alleged events of jesus's life, and it's nothing but lies.
There was no jesus, and there are no gods. All religions are nothing but lies, and you are a stupid person for even considering that such things might hold even a little bit of historic truth.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Nice to hear someone making the argument.
The "Someone did something we don't like, therefore we should hurt them" thing is to engrained in people's minds as the "It's right, because it's what I want" for it to be likely to be overcome in the justice system any time soon, but I wish it were possible for most people to step back a little occasionally and look at the problems with that logic, especially when it's taken to the N'th degree.
Death Penalty? People still promote that? Well, of course they do! Nothing says "Justice" more than wiping the person you dislike off of the face of the Earth. But in practical, realistic, terms, is it actually any better than a sentence of, say, twenty five years in prison?
I say this because the purpose of the sentence in the justice system is generally (justified as being) to deter, and to make someone who committed a crime to pay back for what it is they did, if not directly, then in some superficial "I'll suffer for what I did to someone else" way. As far as deterrence goes, it's hard to believe there's anyone out there who'd think "I'll kill this person, the worst that can happen to me is that I'd spending twenty five years of my life in an 8x8 cell" but not think "I'll kill this person, the worst that can happen to me is that I'd get executed." In both cases, the penalty is significantly higher than anyone would sanely consider bearable.
And as far as pay back goes, leaving aside the fact it isn't positive pay back - nobody's getting compensated, the question has to be asked whether executions would actually be worse than long term imprisonment for anyone but an innocent person expecting to win an appeal anyway. I know I'd rather die than spend decades in jail. Actually, I'd consider death an acceptable alternative to spending five years in jail. Is Death a punishment, or an end?
And yes, I know people fight executions anyway, but I'd wager a fair few do so in the expectation they'll eventually find a way to get released, and released soon, whether that's because they're innocent (and we know a frighteningly large number of innocent people get executed), or because they believe somewhere, somehow, that there's some mitigating set of circumstances that means they don't deserve to be punished and that, one day, they'll convince someone of that. That latter group is not in any rational way "punished" via the Death Penalty either, they go the chair believing themselves to be right.
And, of course, there's an inherent logic that needs to be considered: every time we, as a society, kill someone because we don't like what they did, we're promoting the concept that it's OK to kill someone if you don't like what they did. Every time.
Punishment needs to be contained. A civilized society does contain its punishments, because it accepts that a society is not perfect, that it does not operate a perfect system, and that even those that really have wronged others are more complex than the simplistic human laws of revenge suggest.
The Justice system's system of sentencing needs to be saner and to accept the complexities of real life. Deterrence will always be necessary, and always have a major place in the system. It is not necessary for the government to threaten to kill its citizens to deter them from committing crimes. Likewise payback does not have to be 100% punishment.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.