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mousey musings
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Man sentenced for watching live broadcast of child molestation -- This case illustrates what's wrong with current sentencing practices. I have no problem with giving people who pay for and watch a live kiddie porn video some jail time. However, it seems a bit twisted to give the watcher more time than the guy who was doing the molesting. Why? For the same reason that drug kingpins walk while small fry dealers get life in prison. Drug kingpins can squeal on lots of associates, whereas small fry dealers know little of value to law enforcement. Similarly, the molester was able to give information about a whole network of other molesters, while the perv watching it all didn't know about any other criminals to report. There should be an incentive to help polie, but a kingpin who squeals shouldn't do even less time than the underlings or customers he cultivated. This is, of course, a problem with "zero tolerance," i.e. huge (life) sentences for relatively small-time crooks. If everyone gets a life sentence then the law becomes unable to impose additional penalties on big-time crooks even while jails fill up with small fry. Once you commit a crime, you might as well practice mass murder to protect yourself since the penalty won't increase. Similarly, if everyone gets life then the police have to offer a substantial discount to get information -- but in doing so they reduce the big-time crooks' sentences to below those of their less-culpable (and hence less useful) underlings.
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