No humor this week

According to a recent AP story, the current State Legislature might get a bill to give violators of the law a choice between serving time or enduring “infliction of physical pain.”

The bill will never get out of committee, and it may be just a joke; however, the idea brought to mind many columns I’ve done on crime and punishment. Here is one example which ran Aug. 28, 1985:

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There was a funeral this week for a young Billings woman who died from strangulation and beating with a baseball bat. The guy who said “I must have done it” should have still been in state prison but wasn’t. The Sentence Review Board recently decided the original sentencing judge had been unduly harsh; therefore, they cut the con’s sentence in half and removed his “dangerous offender” label.

A pathologically violent man at Warm Springs hospital had been taking his medicine and behaving well, so when he didn’t show up for breakfast one morning, nobody got too excited. They did bring him back ... after he went to Great Falls and raped one of the same neighbor ladies he had raped before.

The drifter who kidnapped and raped a woman ranger in Glacier National Park, and another bit of human flotsam who beat and raped a mother at the National Bison Range, and the sicko who ruined the lives of little boys at Whitefish, had all been arrested for similar crimes before and turned loose.

The young local hood who ran away from the Swan River Youth Camp about a year ago was transferred to that minimum security unit against the advice of the sentencing judge, who made a special trip to Deer Lodge to personally request the prisoner be kept in the penitentiary. The escapee and his accomplice stole a vehicle, robbed a store and violently committed double rape on a young woman they had kidnapped.

Within six months of his release from the big house by the Sentence Review board, a violent youth did what he promised — “enrolled at the State University.” He also went downtown and murdered a woman.

From my many years as a reporter, newspaper editor and radio newscaster, I could dig out a hundred similar cases where one arm of the justice system does a bad job of out guessing and working against another arm of the justice system. I’m simply raising an issue. If a supra liberal on the State Supreme Court, or a judge in Butte, or anyone else of similar ilk, feels I’ve questioned their wisdom, so be it.

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Wow! The above sounds like this writer was a rather bitter young man in his 60s, but he wasn’t. Was concerned then and still am regarding our nation’s inability to work out a better system for handling violent criminals.

Being an incurable optimist I believe we eventually will. We do have a majority of prosecutors and judges who do the best they can under existing laws.

Can’t help recalling a philosopher who once said, “Each society gets the kind of criminals it deserves.” I sincerely hope he was wrong.

G. George Ostrom is a national award-winning Hungry Horse News columnist. He lives in Kalispell.