Well, I've had at least a couple rapists in my office (not child rapists yet). And to be honest I kinda get it. They're not these intrinsically horrible human beings. They're ridiculously normal in most ways. I've genuinely liked at least 2 of them. And they've raped people. Some are pretty degenerate through and through, but honestly a lot of them have a good amount of redeemable traits. Because of that and because they can look really good on paper it can be difficult to believe that they've committed heinous crimes or that they may again. I think, socially, we have these pictures in our heads of what a rapist, child molester, drug dealer, etc look like. So when it doesn't match up....well....it's hard to see the real picture. Plus for male judges particularly it may be more difficult to jump into the victim's shoes and understand the depth of emotional scars rape can leave people. A lot of rapes don't leave a lot of obvious scars and physical injuries.
I don't think that rape should still go unpunished.... though I wish our penal system in general was more focused on actually rehabilitating these people than simply punishing them. I can just get why its hard to fathom and how easy it is to have compassion.
Peterson demonstrates he doesn't (want to?) understand the situation at all...
The judge’s comment is the sort of remark that, viewed from one angle — and especially when viewed by people seeking a cause for indignation or looking for a weapon to use in a larger war — was sure to stir up trouble:
Rape is obviously not the act of a good man.
But can good men do bad things? Can a good person act terribly? Yes. Sadly, it happens all the time. And, despite the photograph accompanying the article to which I link above, which makes him look supremely smug and self-satisfied, there is apparently considerable strong evidence for good things in and about this man.
It’s transparently clear to me what Judge Low’s point was. Those who are going after him seem to me, in many ways, to be seeking to make him an offender for a word. It’s almost as if they’re deliberately trying to misunderstand his comment.
Restore Our Humanity, a Utah civil rights group that has launched an initiative to help sexual assault victims, filed a complaint with state officials Thursday, saying the judge's comments minimize Vallejo's actions.
Restore Our Humanity Executive Director Mark Lawrence wrote in the complaint that Low's comments violated judicial rules requiring judges to be impartial and unbiased.
"To verbally praise the defendant as an 'extraordinary, good man' during the sentencing hearing is absolutely judicially inappropriate," the complaint reads, "and shows bias towards membership of [a] particular faith. One can only wonder if the hearing and sentencing results would have ended with a different tone had the defendant been Catholic, Jewish or other."
“When we are confronted with evidence that challenges our deeply held beliefs we are more likely to reframe the evidence than we are to alter our beliefs. We simply invent new reasons, new justifications, new explanations. Sometimes we ignore the evidence altogether.” (Mathew Syed 'Black Box Thinking')
People are not sent to prison because, after some kind of hypothetical and totalising evaluation they are judged to be, on the whole. more bad than good.
The law is not there to classify people as bad or good. It deals with whether or not the accused is judged to have done certain acts, colloquially known as 'crimes', carefully defined in law, for which certain penalties are laid down.
Should it be decided that the accused has done such acts, it falls to the judge to choose and pronounce a sentence. Sentimentalising about whether or not the person is 'good' or not is not a part of that task. And for the judge to state in court, in front of the man's victims, his purely personal view that the convicted rapist is 'an extraordinarily good man' was a breathtakingly inappropriate use of judicial speech.
Trust DCP to leap in with a comment that makes himself look even more foolish than he already does.
Zadok: I did not have a faith crisis. I discovered that the Church was having a truth crisis. Maksutov: That's the problem with this supernatural stuff, it doesn't really solve anything. It's a placeholder for ignorance.
This is an image that Judge Thomas Low and Dip Chip Peterson plainly do not understand.
a.k.a. Pokatatorjoined Oct 26, 2006 and permanently banned from MAD Nov 6, 2006
"Stop being such a damned coward and use your real name to own your position."
"That's what he gets for posting in his own name."
2 different threads same day 2 hours apart Yohoo Bat 12/1/2015
Tator wrote: This is an image that Judge Thomas Low and Dip Chip Peterson plainly do not understand.
"Iustitia, the Roman goddess of Justice, who is equivalent to the Greek goddess Themis" pagan gods by heathen languages... the only god/gods who counts/count is/are the hebrew one/ones ! jehovah/jahveh/yahveh/jhwh/adonai
please articulate his/their name/names by american english pronounciation (with utahn-slc accent)
Choyo Chagas is Chairman of the Big Four, the ruler of the planet from "The Bull's Hour" ( Russian: Час Быка), a social science fiction novel written by Soviet author and paleontologist Ivan Yefremov in 1968. Six months after its publication Soviet authorities banned the book and attempted to remove it from libraries and bookshops.
