Posted on 06/28/2014 8:11:34 PM PDT by Morgana
VERNON — A former nurse practitioner from Vernon admitted in court on Thursday that he raped a 3-year-old girl and conspired to rape an 18-month-old baby.
Jay Mohler-Avery, 46, in pleading guilty, also admitted trying to get the mother of the 18-month-old to move her four children and herself in with him so they could be his sex slaves.
He claimed, according to the police investigation, as outlined by prosecutor Elizabeth C. Leaming, that children would not be harmed by having adults sexually exploit them.
"Children should be able to explore their sexual curiosity in the home with other children as well as adults," Mohler-Avery told the 18-month-old's mother, according to Leaming. Mohler-Avery also badgered the woman for days to bring her 18-month-old daughter to him so that he could "break her in early," Leaming said.
(Excerpt) Read more at courant.com ...
I struggle to have mercy because I know for a fact that if I do not, I shall not obtain mercy.
Because if you had daughters, you would understand the rage.
No offense intended. I can feel the rage rise up inside me when it comes to protecting my daughters. And to think this animal went after babies.
There is a need to protect ourselves from these people. They do not deserve to live within our society.
Let me guess - you were not molested as a child! How blessed you are.
WOW - talk about taking verse out of context! There was nothing that this guy did that was “good” or “pleasing to God”!
Repent?
The guy had done it more than once.
How many children does this guy have to RAPE before you realize he’s just plain evil?
And before you throw out “Judge not lest ye be judge” I’m talking using Spiritual discernment.
Jesus Lady (I’m assuming you are) what kind of person are you?
Yeah, that’s a Catch-22.
My life was destroyed by one.
Pretty hard to sit and hope that in spite of the hell me and all those other little girls endured, he winds up in a comfy chair at Jesus’s feet, ya know?
I’m pretty sure if Moses had had a wood chipper he would have used it too.
I agree with everything you said here. That's why the solution in this kind of exceptionally morally depraved case is either life imprisonment without possibility of parole, or a just execution which is swift and certain.
I do not wish to use this forum as a tells-all TMI session, but don’t assume anything.
The man is not reported to have repented. This he needs to do to save his soul. And even if he does, he needs to be separated from society until the day he dies. That means "life without the possibility of parole," or a just death sentence which is carried out in a ways that is swift and certain.
The man is not reported to have repented. This he needs to do to save his soul. And even if he does, he needs to be separated from society until the day he dies. That means "life without the possibility of parole," or a just death sentence which is carried out in a way that is swift and certain.
(That is the sentence Pope Innocent III reportedly got at his Particular Judgment. On the day he died, he reportedly appeared to Lutgarda, an Abbess in Belgium, engulfed in flames, and begged the prayers of her and her sisters, lest he remain in Purgtory for "centuries.")
If he is not repentant, of course, he has nothing to look forward to but Hell for eternity, "Where the worm does not die, nor is the fire ever quenched."
Moses was not ignorant of various ways of inflicting tortuous death.
Egyptians and other peoples of the time could do just about as good a job of it as we could today. It’s a process that hardly requires high technology. Burning, impalement, crucifixion, to name just a few, are all pretty low tech.
That Moses (or God, or whoever you think responsible for the Law) nevertheless chose to not inflict such deaths on criminals, unlike most law codes of the time, means something.
Hellish methods in response to hellish actions.
“An eye for an eye...”
What you are seeing is neither diabolical nor bestial, but proportionate. Posters are thinking of punishments that fit the crime. The problem is that the crimes are so beyond what ordinary people can conceive, that they grasp for punishments beyond what they conceive.
But these are natural, normal responses to unimaginable evil. They aren't bestial or demonic.
That being the case, Jesus abrogated the law of retaliation, and although the starting place for His disciple may be the imagining of cruel tortures, it isn't the proper ending place.
After working through the anger and rage that are justly provoked by this cretin's actions, the proper conclusion is that a just punishment would be something like death by hanging - swift, a minimum of fuss and muss, and certain.
But that's where folks, one hopes, get to after some reflection. It is not necessarily where folks will, with justice, begin.
Imagining horrific tortures for baby rapists is merely an attempt by regular folks to balance the scales.
My old Uncle Mike used to ask, if someone who commits the murder of an innocent can justly be executed, what should be the penalty for someone who commits two such murders? Or who commits mass murder? Do we execute the miscreant more than once? Is not justice lacking if the fellow who murders one receives the same sentence as the fellow who murders many? Old Uncle Mike was a wily fellow.
But he had a point. I've often thought that there would be a certain justice in sentencing a mass murderer to multiple almost-executions - a partial hanging, or a partial electrocution, just to the point of death, for each victim. That would be a more mathematically-precise application of justice.
Thus it is, with a child rapist, that if execution is just for less heinous actions, what should befall the one who commits acts so heinous as to beggar the imagination of the ordinary sinner?
The difficulty with that approach is that if fails to observe the limitations of human existence, and it attempts a utopian resolution to the problem of criminal justice. It aims for perfect justice, which is not to be found in this life.
But it is wrong to label as “demonic” or “bestial” the reaction to attempt to make the punishment fit the crime. Better to label these attempts as “ultimately futile,” and “in need of further reflection,” and “in the final analysis, unjust.”
sitetest
I am continually amazed at the “Christians” who seem to think Christ’s sacrifice is inadequate to cover a sin we find particularly horrifying. Assuming repentance and acceptance of Jesus as his savior, of course.
I agree with the horror, but the validity of His sacrifice is simply not affected by the number or severity of our crimes or sins.
Luckily.
The recognition that this child molester is as eligible for salvation as anyone else does not change the fact that he is still on the hook for secular punishment for the crimes he has committed.
I didn't say the Law of Talion ("eye for an eye") was bestial or demonic. I said abominable tortures shared around by FReepers for mutual enjoyment, is demonic.
Certainly, any person properly and justly angry at a child-rapist, may feel a further tempting impulse from his irascible nature to devise hideous tortures. Dante's multiplex imagination supplied a lot of this for his Inferno.
However, indulging the irascible appetite in this manner --- enjoying the idea of certain kinds of tortures --- is corrupt, just as corrupt as indulging one's erotic appetite by fantasizing sexual gratification with children, broadcasting one's proclivity to lust after children, or even enjoying the idea of gratifying oneself with children.
Giving in to an irascible passion is corrupting to oneself, and to anyone else who has a part in the fantasy of torture: either by applauding it, seconding it, further elaborating it, or even tolerating it without rebuke.
You spoke well when you said Better to label these attempts as “ultimately futile,” and “in need of further reflection,” and “in the final analysis, unjust.”
But the fantasy of torture also needs rebuke. Otherwise people pursue their unclean thoughts in public, without shame, to the corruption of our online community and the peril of their souls.
We all need nothing so much as to be "transformed in the renewal of our minds."
Romans 12:2
Do not conform to the pattern of this world,
but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
Then you will be able to test and approve
what God’s will is—
his good, pleasing and perfect will.
We're in total agreement.
There's this, too: #112
I believe, too, in the existence of a painful purification process by which a serious sinner --- who is repentant --- can redress the scales of justice.
And these are, to me, some of the toughest words in the Bible:
Matthew 5:26
Truly I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.
I guess from my perspective, the “abominable tortures shared around by FReepers for mutual enjoyment” is a reasonable attempt to make the punishment fit the crime, to devise harms that seem to satisfy the apparent demands on justice. I don't know why one would expect that the initial reaction to crimes such as these would be much other than a desire for savage justice, an attempt to match cruelty for cruelty, pain for pain, horror for horror, abomination for abomination.
But as I pointed out, it's a starting place, not an appropriate ending place.
And the journey from one place to another, for us humans, takes place in time. We're not like angels, with infused knowledge, with instantaneous working out in our minds and souls of all the implications of life. We go through process.
This is ultimately about forgiveness. To truly forgive, one must, MUST start where he is, which is usually not-forgiveness. The forgiveness easily given, readily thrown to the other, like a life preserver off an ocean liner to the one drowning at sea, is a sign either of no real great offense in the first place, or of insincerity. Or perhaps of an unwillingness to get down to the messy business of it all, unwilling to grapple directly with the offense and the offender. Just throw out the life preserver and get back to the party.
Where the offense is great and keenly felt, the journey to real forgiveness is arduous, and can be quite long. It usually starts in the quest for perfect justice, no matter how horrible that might be, in the desire to match pain for pain. Think about the law of “an eye for an eye.” What is described therein would be by most definitions today, torture. You blind me, I get to gouge out one of your eyes. You knock out my teeth, I get to yank teeth our of your head. I don't know - sounds sorta like torture to me.
Is this initial response saintly and pure? Of course not. Can we say that it is rooted in Original Sin? Certainly, why not? Thus, is it imperfect, yes, even “corrupt”? In so far as it goes.
But it is, nonetheless, where normal, not demonic, ordinary, not bestial, folks usually begin. And it can be a long journey out.
It's right to encourage folks along the way. It's the right thing to do to try to turn folks away from their savage fury to a more considered approach, and to help folks step toward forgiveness.
But not to lecture folks that they're bestial and demonic because they have a just reaction to a hateful crime.
I think that you engage in the very same hyperbole that you're implicitly criticizing herein (and, yes, the punishments described herein are just that - hyperbole), and you indulge your own inflamed anger that people write thusly! "They're not behaving like saints! Or at least, not the way I think saints should behave! Shocking! Shocking!"
Cut me a break.
I hope we all go to Heaven, and in that hope, I must by necessity intend that all will forgive all, and regret their (our) angry words (and, sometimes, acts) of vengeance, but I cannot offer such harsh words toward folks having a normal, if less than entirely-saintly, reaction to unspeakable horror.
sitetest
However think your experience must really differ from mine. You say that this practice sharing of lurid fantasies of revenge-torture against evildoers "is, nonetheless, where normal, not demonic, ordinary, not bestial, folks usually begin."
I'm 62 and have known many hundreds of people (not all just like me as you slice the sociological salami),in a number of places under many difference circumstances, and sometimes under situations of stress, betrayal, crime and harm, and I have never known anyone to indulge in shared torture-fantasy-revenge language, outside of Free Republic.
Really.
They may have thought it --- I have no way of knowing --- they were not all preternaturally empathetic, "nice," or even "conventionally socialized". But I never ran into people who openly talked or wrote like that, until right here at this illustrious website.
That's why it strikes me as, at best, immature emotional self-indulgence, and at worst, an opening of the soul to vicious bodiless entities.
Being of Italian extraction, I've heard some interesting ideas on what should be done with miscreants of various sorts. I could tell you of punishments meted out by my great grandmother to various members of her community back in Brooklyn. Not talked about. Actually committed. Maybe it's a cultural thing.
In that we have a greater bandwidth when speaking face to face with people, descriptions of these sorts, in my own family, required fewer words, but more gestures. Also, there are things, when said, that serve as a shorthand. Less was spoken, but more was said.
But this sort of hyperbole (and sometime, real deeds and actions) is not limited to us more expressive southern Europeans. I remember reading an interview with Mrs. Billy Graham about the difficulties of being Mr. Billy Graham's wife. The interviewer asked, “Did you ever think about divorcing him?”
She answered waving her hand, “Divorce? No. Murder? Well...”
I used to bowl with the Knights of Columbus. Get a group of beer-drinking guys together doing some beer-drinking-guy-like activity, and you'll get this sort of talk. But remember, the artifice of the “Internet thread” that focuses on a single subject at a time, where there may be tens, or scores, for even a hundred or more posters has a tendency to accentuate the phenomenon.
I also take a bit of issue with the use of the word “torture.” It's a slippery word, and I don't usually use it because its current use has often emptied it of meaning. Singapore canes people. Is that torture? The US military waterboarded folks. Torture? I know what being imprisoned in a maximum security prison does to previously not-insane people. It usually causes psychosis. Thus, is life in prison in a supermax prison, without the possibility of parole, torture?
Where does earned punishment end and torture begin?
I never hit or spanked either of my two sons. Never felt it was necessary. But they will tell you that they'd have preferred to be spanked rather than listen to my lectures and having to write the essays assigned to them as punishment. They have even asserted that my lectures and essays were a form of torture.
I don't see the answers as being so clear cut, and I'm afraid that in this thread, folks have permitted you to steal this premise.
Torture is easier to grasp when we're talking about trying to coerce specific behaviors: “Give me the code word to stop the bomb from going off, or I'll gouge out your other eye.” But what if the loss of the eye is the mandated punishment for having caused another the loss of his eye?
I'll give you that sometimes, Internet fora act like echo chambers, and encourage and magnify behaviors that are best left unencouraged. But that doesn't make the thirst for justice represented by these exaggerated punishments either demonic or bestial.
sitetest
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