Who is to blame?

Within the last two weeks of 2015 and first two of our new 2016, I have reported in my radio news, facts on at least 10 Montana criminal cases where proven felons have committed or attempted to commit new atrocities against the public peace. Some were awaiting sentencing on their last transgression and others were out on parole or probation.

Is this a new wave of problems for our criminal justice system?? Allow me to repeat a column written about crime in 1985:

There was a funeral this week for a young Billings woman who died from being strangled and hit on the head with a baseball bat. The guy who said, “I must have done it,” should have still been in the state prison but he wasn’t. The Sentence Review Board had 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. That apparently well-intended action released another “misdirected youth” to do his thing.

A pathologically violent man at Warm Springs mental hospital had been taking his medicine and behaving quite well, so when he didn’t show up for breakfast one morning nobody got too concerned. They eventually brought 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 Park and another bit of human flotsam who beat and raped a mother at the Bison Range, and the sicky who ruined the lives of over six little boys up 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 girl 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 and enrolled at the State University. He also went downtown and murdered a woman.

From my years as a reporter, newspaper editor, and radio newscaster, I could dig out tens of dozens of similar cases where one arm of the justice system does a tragic job of out guessing and working against another arm of the justice system. This is a very legitimate public issue. If some liberal legal game-player on the State Supreme Court, or a judge over in Butte, or anyone else, feels I’ve questioned their wisdom, so be it.

When enough of the regular citizens get the idea there are some incompetent public servants throwing rocks into the wheels of justice, maybe we could work at improving the system.

Sometime in the past a noted philosopher said, “Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves.”

I like to believe and hope, “That is not so.”

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