We at PWSBKTW are the forgiving sort. We know that second chances are the American way. We also know that releasing sexual predators from jail is what enlightened societies do. And we’re not talking about the seventeen-year-old who texted a nude picture of himself to his sixteen-year-old girlfriend and got registered as a sex offender, either. No, we’re talking about the real thing, the keep-you-up-at-night predators who snatch little girls off the street. They deserve second chances. They are, after all, people too. Some of them do a lot with their second chances. Phillip Garrido did a lot with his.

An 11-year-old California girl kidnapped in 1991 while waiting for a school bus has been found alive, and a convicted sex offender is accused of raping and fathering two children with her while he and his wife held her captive in their backyard.

Were we to include all of the terrible details, some might accuse us of playing to the emotions of our readers, stirring them up to unnecessary outrage.

To avoid civil unrest, we won’t mention that Phillip Garrido put the girl and her family through hell. We won’t mention that the girl, Jaycee Lee Dugard, now 29, had lived in sheds in the backyard, not gone to school, not seen a doctor in all the time she was Garrido’s captive.

We won’t even mention Jaycee’s own children, now 11 and 15, products of rape, who have never been to school, or a doctor, or had anything resembling a normal life.

We won’t mention that Jaycee’s stepfather had been the prime suspect at the time of the kidnapping, and we most certainly won’t mention the horror he went through, watching Jaycee’s abduction at the bus stop 18 years ago, and his powerlessness to stop it.

We will absolutely not mention what it must have been like for Jaycee’s mother, who missed her girl’s life for 18 years, who probably thought she was dead, who, we can guess, went to sleep every night trying to block out visions of the torture her little girl endured.

We also won’t mention that “Garrido was on lifetime parole“ and will definitely not mention that some fine journalists have noted that “his arrest raises questions about how closely parolees are monitored.” We won’t use the phrase “understatement of the century.” It’s not the sort of thing we would say. We won’t mention that someone who is deemed such a threat to society that he is put on parole for life might be just the sort of fellow to not let out of jail.

We at PWSBKTW won’t mention any of that. We wouldn’t want to rile anyone up.

We will mention Phillip Garrido, since this is really about him. He told “CNN affiliate KCRA of Sacramento he was relieved at being caught. ‘I feel much better now.’”

We at PWSBKTW are pleased that he feels better. We had been concerned about his psychological state. Now that he’s unburdened himself, Phillip Garrido should be killed this week. Then he should be paroled. Again.

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Tags: on the law, people who should be killed this week // 3 Comments »