Link: .
What is the likelyhood they’ll get little to no punishment? The charges against him were assault and child molestation. I think we all know what happens in prison to child molestors. This sickens me. It’s a travesty of justice.
The victim mentality of this really is disturbing, for people to think it OK to send a man to prison for 8 months, also likely bringing on abuse for the false charges, for a fucking late.
What do you all think would be adequate punishment for this?
8 months in jail?
Seriously, if you faced the same penalty as the person you were accusing, should it be proved that your allegation is unfounded, there would be a lot less spurious litigation.
Cheers.
I don’t know about officially punishing the girls because I find it hard to believe eleven year olds could grasp all the ramifications of making such an accusation.
I hope he sues them all though. That way, when their parents have to sell all of their stuff to pay the damages they’ll understand that making false accusations of child molestation isn’t prank material
I find it hard to believe that at 11 they wouldn’t understand 1) what a prison is for 2) and what would happen if they accused him of a crime(he’d go to prison).
I think MOST 11 year olds would understand the seriousness of an accusation like that. 11 year olds are not dumb.
Here in NZ, they’d be considered underage. There might be some family conferences held with the child welfare and police representatives. But legally, they’d be considered below the age of culpability and awareness of the ramifications of their actions.
Anything for a lark, I suppose. :rolleyes:
Put me in with the 8 months in jail crowd.
AND I hope the homeless man sues so he doesn’t have to be homeless anymore.
Actually having to give up the house to the homeless man sounds like justice to me! 
I think the moral and ethical thing to do would be for the girls’ parents to pay for Nordmark’s defense attorney. The girls should also do some mandatory community service, as someone already suggested, as punishment for lying. When I say “community service”, I’m not talking about fun community service like Girl Scouts. I’m talking picking up trash in the public park. And it should be long enough (say 100 hours) that it sinks in.
The police officers who allowed the line-up screwups to happen should also go back and get better training in line-ups. The DA who prosecuted the case should be ashamed of themselves.
Robin
Stories like this infuriate me. It’s hard enough to get real rape and molestation charges prosecuted. Each time a false report is filed, then all the real victims of these crimes face a harder time proving what happened. I don’t know what would be fit punishment for the girls, but the police need to look into their procedures. I think that the police were, in this instance, just looking for an easy conviction.
I’m just glad that the man had enough sense to keep his mouth shut about why he was in prison. Being accused of something like that, when innocent, must be an absolute nightmare.
This is why I’m for the death penalty in theory, but I’m reluctant to have it widely used. As humans, we too often convict the innocent.
Well, it’s kind of hard to say for sure based on one (sympathetically slanted) newstory, but the homeless man sounds like a pretty good sort, doesn’t he?
As for the girls… well, I’m not calling for 11 year old girls to do 8 months in jail. However, I wouldn’t object at all to them being made to give up 8 months worth of weekend and school holiday time doing rather unpleasant community service. Perhaps spending most of their leisure hours for 8 months cleaning toilets in a homeless shelter will open their eyes. Also, I think it a given that their families should have to pay for their victim’s lawyer – if the defense attorney was court-appointed, then they should have to reinburse the county. And, I would require them to meet face-to-face with the man they wronged and apologize to him.
Ok, I changed my mind, I’m with Jess on this now
8 months of nasty community service for the two.
Oh, and this is exactly why I’m AGAINST the death penalty. The system is FAR, VERY FAR from perfect. A ‘solution’ with such finality has no place in this kind of system.
I don’t think that eight month’s worth, or even a full year’s worth, of cleaning homeless shelters would be too harsh a sentence for those girls. It would do them some good to have to give up THEIR freedoms and pleasures, particularly since the whole reason they made up this story was so that one of them wouldn’t have to face punishment for being tardy. Eleven years old is old enough to sweep and mop and carry trash. I was doing quite a bit of housework when I was eleven.
I think that these girls desperately need to face some sort of consequences for their actions. They did an incredibly horrid thing to this man.
This makes me so fucking angry. A similar thing happened to my brother and he was in jail for 2 months because some 16 year said she was having an affair with him. The charges were dropped for lack of evidence and a civil case is pending against her, her parents, and the school where he was working that filed the actual charges.
See the original thread on this here
I hope the next time someone rails about an accused getting off “on a technicality” like the order of lineup photos not being changed, they will remember that there is a reason for procedures like that, and potentially bad consequences when those procedures are not followed.
the REALLY fitting punishment for the girls…
ONCE THEY BECOME OF LEGAL AGE.
And that’s all I’m gonna say about that.
There is some culpability on the part of the police dept. here. They were awfully eager to lock a guy up with no physical evidence. I’m suspicious of the way the girls were led into fingering the guy. I think it’s only fair that the city pay some restitution for this guy.
The girls need some glamorless community service and I think a “scared straight” type of visit to a prison might be enlightening too. Let them see what it’s like and ask them how they’d feel if someone put them in a prison by lying about them. It might force them to some real appreciation for what they did.
Nasty/boring/long public service for the girls, check.
Parents not fined, unless there is some evidence they helped their girls do this or knew they were making it up. 11 year olds are old enough to come up with pranks independently, and commit crimes that would horrify the parents, too. We all know of families where 2 out 3 children turn out good and the remaining 1 goes bad – despite having the same parents and up bringing. Would you punish the parents of an 11 year old child who stole a car, absent any reason to believe the parents taught him to do it, encouraged him to do it, whatever?
More important, the SYSTEM owes a lot to this guy – both the police and prosecutor screwed up.
So how about the funds are found to put this guy into a decent apartment, rent paid for eight months, PLUS he is given every bit of treatment available for any factors that contributed to his becoming homeless (as in, treatment for drug/alcohol addiction, gambling addiction, mental illness, whatever) AND every effort is made to find him a job that he is able to perform and that pays well enough to allow him to continue to live in the apartment if he continues to do it.
He’s lost those eight months, but maybe that way something good will come out of it for the rest of his future.
Well yes, yes I would. Parents are still responsible for their children, are they not? Even if they had no active role in the girls’ actions, they are still legally responsible for what they do. And they have an additional 7 years of being responsible for them, too.
I would go along with the girls’ having to perform community service - cleaning shelters, working in soup kitchens, what have you - for at least 8 months. But you know, that removal of freedom still won’t convey how horrid jail actually is. So I would propose that the girls must spend one night in jail. That’s all - one night. In addition to the 8 months of community service and whatever other nonjail punishment is doled out.
I’ve never spent any time in jail, but I can’t imagine it being anything but a hellish place for anyone, let alone children. If you put these two kids in there for one night - give them their own cell to share, but not any amenities or favortism - and I think that’ll go a long way to making them understand how much they made that homeless guy suffer.
Child molestation, along with sexual offences of all kinds have become the witchcraft charge of the modern age.
Think of what happened in Salem, it is not too far removed from what happened here.
Child abuse is used as a weapon in custody battles, and the discriminaation and injustice is generally based sololey on the gender of the adult, if women were treated in such a manner there would be an outcry, men seem to all be seen as potential beasts and their only virtue is that they earn wages with which to support former spouses.
Haven’t there been cases where innocent people have been not only charged, but convicted of molestation on no other evidence but the testimony of young children? What baffles me is how a child could be considered to young to be responsible for lying, yet at the same time be considered a credible witness.