A defendant who was captured in courtroom video leaping over a judge’s bench and attacking her, touching off a bloody brawl, is scheduled to appear before her again Monday morning.
In his Jan. 3 appearance before Clark County District Court Judge Mary Kay Holthus, Deobra Redden, who was facing prison time for a felony battery charge stemming from a baseball bat attack last year, tried to convince the judge that he was turning around his violent past.
Redden asked for leniency while describing himself as “a person who never stops trying to do the right thing no matter how hard it is.”
But when it became clear Holthus was going to sentence him to prison time, and as the court marshal moved to handcuff and take him into custody, Redden yelled expletives and charged forward. People in the courtroom audience, including his foster mother, began to scream.
You didn’t say change. You said turn their life around. Don’t change your words now, bud. To which I said, no not everyone can turn their life around. Some people are only capable of getting worse.
And sure that’s the point of the criminal justice system, ideally.
The point of jail/prison itself is to keep offenders segregated from society while that happens, with security levels matching the severity and risk of the offender. For those that cannot be reformed or have committed unforgivable crimes, the point is to permanently segregate them from society to prevent them from further harming it.
To turn someone’s life around is to change for the better. I also quoted you with that phrase.
If you’re going to argue semantics, invest in a thesaurus. Also, if youre going to play the pedantic card, don’t use colloquialisms.
I’d suggest you do some reading on the histories of criminal punishments and how society has evolved around them.
I’d also like to point out how you ignored what I said: you acknowledge he has changed, but is only capable of changing in one direction. Which is a silly thought if you’ve ever met a person who has made mistakes. Maybe you haven’t.
My god you really have no reading comprehension do you? Or you just don’t know how to have a good faith conversation.
YOU started with the colloquialism. That was entirely you. I never used it other than responding to YOUR use of it.
I know what it means, and I am arguing that SOME people are NOT capable of changing for the better. SOME people only change for the worst.
Violent crimes are also not “making a mistake”, ffs. They are a conscious act to decide to severely harm another person. In this dudes case he consciously made the decision to try to end another person’s life by violently beating them with a baseball bat. After having repeated other offenses of violently attacking others and being given chances to reform.
And even then he was given incredible leniency by having the charge dropped from assault with a deadly weapon to attempted assault causing substantial bodily harm.
Plenty of violent crimes are mistakes. Plenty of people are not actually violent during a crime and charged as accessories, thereby making them as violent in the eyes of the law (and by extension, the layman).
And I quoted you for the phrase “turn their life around”.
But we can still ignore the rest of what I’m saying if you want: jails aren’t for what you said they were for. If you want, I can offer you another word though - prison. Which is where you actually go in the states to be locked away for life.
Which is still not good and does more harm than anything else. So you had the words wrong and you are pushing a childish, vengeful, harmful view that only exists to make you and others like you feel good. Most of the developed world disagrees with your small thinking and can back it up with proof.
I don’t think I have a problem with reading, words, or their meanings. Do you?
My brother in Christ, again you need reading comprehension.
Why don’t you go look at the comment I replied to before you jumped in. I’ll wait.
Read it? So you see where it says it first and I replied to that?
I’m done with you here. You can keep defending violent scum. Hope you sing the same tune when it’s someone you love affected by a repeat violent offender that was repeatedly let out.
Jails aren’t prisons. People can change. Both of those statements being true mean that your original comment that started this chain of events is false.