The OP didn’t ask for comparisons or a moral rating of the crime.
So fuck all of those who did.
Well, hold on a second. I’m the first to agree that doing something like this to a live person is worse than a dead body, but in both cases it is sick and demented. My “Sicko” meter is pegged all the way over to the right. There is just something about this that is evil, though. A wrongness if you will. Like how Stephen King might say, “wrong”. The type of wrong where the perpetrator’s father himself will take down his shotgun over the fireplace mantle and walk them out into the woods, but come back alone. The type of wrong where the mother would pause in her knitting for a moment as her husband snapped open the shotgun to check the load and then continue until her husband had left. She would then get up from her chair and go and gather everything related to the perpetrators, pictures with them in it, toys, clothes, anything that testified to their existance. She’d gather it up and put it in a pile in the back yard and burn it all. She might have a tear in her eye as she did so, it wouldn’t be for them, but for the dead little girl. Then she’d go back and sit by the fire and wait for her husband to come home.
I think it is the disrespect for the dead that causes people such discomfort. These creatures have taken the one last thing this little girl had which was the good memory left with her family. Now that is tainted by their actions.
Wait for the civil suit. They probably won’t get anything, but NOBODY will ever forget these two pieces of shit.
Martin
ditto
What, pray tell, DID the OP ask for?
**
You can’t assault a piece of meat and when you cease to live all you are is a piece of meat. Let’s look at this from another perspective. Sure, this piece of meat was unable to offer any resistance or fight back. On the other hand nobody had to suffer being attacked and molested.
I agree that damage has been done to the family. However once I’m dead there’s nothing that can be done to harm my soul.
Marc
MGibson said it the way I wanted to, bur refrained.
A dead body is meat. Meat that once held a person, but once that person is gone, it’s just meat. You can’t hurt meat. A dead person cannot be violated, harmed, hurt, humiliated, or anything else. There is nobody there.
If it hadn’t been for the fact that there was some concern about whether the “rape” happened before or after the child died, the kind move would have been to never say anything about it. it is unfortunate that the parents had to know about it.
Umm, correct me if I’m mistaken, but are you here advocating the idea that it would be acceptable * on any level * for the father of a dead child whose body was desecrated to KILL the ones who desecrated it?
And people wonder why any of us are drawing comparisons, questioning the vehemence and anger?
Good lord.
I’m just posting to round out the “DIRTBAG CREATURE THREE” roster…
Uh, no. I suggested that the father of the perpetrators would do it as a service to society.
Nevermind, I retract what I wrote. It was just the gut feeling I had faced with this shit.
I logically agree that a body isn’t a live person, so it isn’t the same, but emotionally I’m having problems with the thought processes (or lack thereof) of the perpetrators.
Shayna, I know where your anger come from, but cut people some slack. I know that I am grossed out at maximum level here, I don’t think anybody is suggesting that this was “better” as in “good-better-best” but as in “bad-worse-worst”. What they did was BAD but it could be worse, there could be one more victim, that is the little girl. We comfort themselves in that thought: "at least she didn’t suffer.
I attended the funeral of a relative yesterday, this feels closer somehow. When people loose a dear one (and a child is important to all normal members of society) we have different ways of coping. My relative died instantly (and grossly) in a traffic accident. I found his mom crying over a child (well, he was 35 yo) that she prepared breakfast for, say goodbye when he went to work and 5 minutes later is very dead. She was thanking God “that at least he didn’t suffer”. Was she thanking God that he was dead? Hell no? Did she think his death was OK on any level? Of course not. She just thought it was better (as in “bad-worse-worst”) that he didn’t die slowly on the pavement.
Did I make any sense?
scratch loose, I meant lose. I can’t type for the life of me.
I think the Terrible Trio would be a great name. Now that we’ve got a cool name we need some spiffy costumes, some sort of schtick, and of course a do gooder nemisis.
Marc
sniff. I’m always ignored. 
You know, I guess I was just in denial, but until just now I really couldn’t believe that Shayna’s outburst was directed at * us. * Was she really screaming and calling * us * dirtbags? Because we can see past our disgust to the fact that the harm that was done here was relatively minor in the grand scheme of things?
Nah… I still don’t believe it.
Because the discussion has gone in this direction:
If you’re going to talk about punishment, then indeed you have to quantify the level of nastiness; you have to debate which crimes are worse than which other crimes.
According to this article, mutilation of a corpse carries a maximum penalty of three years in prison in that jurisdiction. If samarm and ivylass are going to argue that these slimeballs’ punishment will be insufficient, then that gets us into the whole comparison business.
If this had been a live girl, one hopes the perps would have gotten 20 years of hard time. Why? Mostly because the trauma from that act would reverberate throughout the rest of that child’s life. But in this instance, the child was not there. This was an ex-child. That particular trauma did not happen.
But think of the trauma to the family, you say. I am: the family of a live 4-year-old rape victim endures the same trauma. Unless we are to say that the greater part of the sentence for the rape of such an innocent is due to the trauma her family endures, then we must conclude that the sentence in this case must be much, much smaller than that applied for the rape of a live child.
This may seem rather coldhearted and calculated, but we must do these sorts of calculations if our criminal code is to make sense. Part of fighting ignorance, if we’re going to talk about punishment, retribution, cleansing of society, or whatever, consists of refusing to overreact to the horror of the moment. And based on similar responses in past threads, we do an astoundingly bad job of it here.
[sub]I can’t believe it: Stoid and me (dirtbag #5; I saw you, goldfish) in agreement with SPOOFE and MGibson. Ooh, baby baby, it’s a weird world…[/sub]
The water in the creek behind my house has turned to blood, Lake Pine Bluff is boiling, and I saw four horseman flying through the sky.
Marc
This came on the news not too long ago. They showed video footeage of the little girl, as well as the two people involved in the crime. They also showed the mother talking. Very heartbreaking.
The newsman then went on to mention that the maximum sentence would be three years!!! He stated that necrophilia is not a crime in California!
Whether or not you feel this crime is worse if the girl were dead or alive, I think that three years is so criminally unfair, it just adds to the horror.
sigh
Why is it in most of the discussion of the offenders in this thread, I have seen little to no discussion of these two being mentally ill.
What I think is that they need be put into a mental health program to treat them. A healthy person, as far as I believe at least, does not want sex with the dead, not to mention dead children.
Guess I’m one more dirtbag. What happened here is easily the most revolting thing I’ve ever heard. But “revolting” isn’t the standard of our legal system. Harm is. And the harm here is slight, compared to the rape of a living victim. Certainly, the emotional harm to the family needs to be taken into consideration, but I believe that is properly the provence of civil, not criminal courts. And even on that score, well… I don’t have kids, so I can only conjecture what I’d feel in that situation, but I think the grief from the loss of the daughter would over-shadow any outrage over what happened to her corpse. I could very well be wrong about that, though.
I agree that the two perpetrators should be institutionalized. This is clearly a sign of severe mental problems. If they’re sick enough to do this, who knows what else they might be capable of?
I guess because people are only sympathetic of those with mental illness as long as they don’t hurt anybody.