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To Catch a Predator - Settlement over suicide
King Boo Hoo
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Registered User regular
"NBC Universal has settled a $105 million lawsuit brought by a woman who claimed a televised sex sting by "Dateline NBC: To Catch A Predator" drove her brother to kill himself." Story here.
For those who don't know, To Catch a Predator is a show on NBC where reporters go on the Internet to pretend they're 10-16 year olds in chat rooms. They engage in sexual chats with strangers and then lure them to come over, theoretically to engage in sex with them. When the alleged-predator arrives, he's greeted not by a 12 year old boy but by Chris Hansen:
And then he uses his trademark line, "Why don't you have a seat over there?".
Hansen then proceeds to talk to the alleged-predator, asking them what they were thinking, why they would do this, etc. All of this is video-taped naturally. At the end Chris Hansen tells them that they're being video-taped, and they're free to go. As soon as they step out the front door they're tackled by police officers and arrested.
The issue arose when one alleged-predator didn't show up to the sting operation. NBC called bunches of cops who stormed over to his house, upon which point the alleged-predator shot himself.
Now to the actually interesting part: Is this show legal? More importantly, is it ethical?
Sure, they're catching potential child-rapists, and the phrase "ends justify the means" does pop into my mind.
On the other hand, who are they to play police? They're reporters who are supposed to report, and as one federal judge said (quoting from the article), the show "crossed the line from responsible journalism to irresponsible and reckless intrusion into law enforcement."
Furthermore, I can't help but wonder if there really are this many child-rapists so easily findable online. The NBC team isn't just hanging around chat rooms and getting invited over to older men's homes after all. They're quite actively pursuing these men, saying whatever they can to get the men to come over. I mean, the alleged-predators are still horrible people for getting convinced via the promise of pedophelia sex, but I just don't think situations happen in real life the way they get the alleged-predators to come over.
A very common line you hear from them when they're talking to Chris Hansen is like "I knew this was a sting operation, I knew it was set up", implying this isn't how things normally go. Furthermore, a great deal of them talk about how they weren't planning to do anything, they just wanted to talk. And even if some of them are lying, I can't help but wonder if some of them really aren't just pathetic guys who chat with kids online but never plan to act on it, but get pushed into actually showing up despite that's not what they would've normally done. I mean, isn't that the very definition of entrapment? From wikipedia: "Entrapment is the act of a law enforcement agent in inducing a person to commit an offence which the person would not have, or was unlikely to have, otherwise committed".
I'm generally against situations where people are lured into breaking the law, it feels unnatural and wrong. I understand if I see a wallet on the ground I should go bring it to the police station, but artificially creating scenarios like leaving wallets on the ground so as to arrest me seem amoral. Furthermore, if it's a sting operation there's a good chance they'll put like $5,000 into the wallet rather than the $50 it would likely have, in order to further tempt me to not return the wallet. Whose to say the same isn't happening here? Rather than what's normally happening, having a conversation between a socially awkward confused kid and a socially awkward screwed up adult, instead exists a conversation between a socially awkward screwed up adult and a vixen intent on seducing him.
I don't know honestly, and that's what concerns me. Calling someone a pedophile sexual predator on national television is something that will ruin their lives forever, without question. If there's any chance they're pulling in people who aren't actually pedophile rapists, then that's greatly alarming and the show should be stopped.
What do you think?
-Edit-
I'm reading some comments from the people at fark.com and this one was particularly on the dot so I'll just quote it:
"Pedophilia is a mental disorder, it should be saught out and treated, not looked for then arrested for deliberate entrapment, to boost ratings for hambeasts who fear for thier precious little snowflake.
The statistics generally say that someone in your family is going to sexually molest your snowflake. Not some stranger off the internet.
But the show preys on a built in, animalistic fear of 'outsiders'. And who could be more outside than someone on the internet? They belong to no social caste, you can't identify race, creed, or sex. They first appear while the show is busy saying how evil they are.
And even if they're innocent, they're guilty for the rest of thier lives, and will be hounded/attacked/bothered by 'hero' vigilantes for being on sex offender registries."
For those who don't know, To Catch a Predator is a show on NBC where reporters go on the Internet to pretend they're 10-16 year olds in chat rooms. They engage in sexual chats with strangers and then lure them to come over, theoretically to engage in sex with them. When the alleged-predator arrives, he's greeted not by a 12 year old boy but by Chris Hansen:
And then he uses his trademark line, "Why don't you have a seat over there?".
Hansen then proceeds to talk to the alleged-predator, asking them what they were thinking, why they would do this, etc. All of this is video-taped naturally. At the end Chris Hansen tells them that they're being video-taped, and they're free to go. As soon as they step out the front door they're tackled by police officers and arrested.
The issue arose when one alleged-predator didn't show up to the sting operation. NBC called bunches of cops who stormed over to his house, upon which point the alleged-predator shot himself.
Now to the actually interesting part: Is this show legal? More importantly, is it ethical?
Sure, they're catching potential child-rapists, and the phrase "ends justify the means" does pop into my mind.
On the other hand, who are they to play police? They're reporters who are supposed to report, and as one federal judge said (quoting from the article), the show "crossed the line from responsible journalism to irresponsible and reckless intrusion into law enforcement."
Furthermore, I can't help but wonder if there really are this many child-rapists so easily findable online. The NBC team isn't just hanging around chat rooms and getting invited over to older men's homes after all. They're quite actively pursuing these men, saying whatever they can to get the men to come over. I mean, the alleged-predators are still horrible people for getting convinced via the promise of pedophelia sex, but I just don't think situations happen in real life the way they get the alleged-predators to come over.
A very common line you hear from them when they're talking to Chris Hansen is like "I knew this was a sting operation, I knew it was set up", implying this isn't how things normally go. Furthermore, a great deal of them talk about how they weren't planning to do anything, they just wanted to talk. And even if some of them are lying, I can't help but wonder if some of them really aren't just pathetic guys who chat with kids online but never plan to act on it, but get pushed into actually showing up despite that's not what they would've normally done. I mean, isn't that the very definition of entrapment? From wikipedia: "Entrapment is the act of a law enforcement agent in inducing a person to commit an offence which the person would not have, or was unlikely to have, otherwise committed".
I'm generally against situations where people are lured into breaking the law, it feels unnatural and wrong. I understand if I see a wallet on the ground I should go bring it to the police station, but artificially creating scenarios like leaving wallets on the ground so as to arrest me seem amoral. Furthermore, if it's a sting operation there's a good chance they'll put like $5,000 into the wallet rather than the $50 it would likely have, in order to further tempt me to not return the wallet. Whose to say the same isn't happening here? Rather than what's normally happening, having a conversation between a socially awkward confused kid and a socially awkward screwed up adult, instead exists a conversation between a socially awkward screwed up adult and a vixen intent on seducing him.
I don't know honestly, and that's what concerns me. Calling someone a pedophile sexual predator on national television is something that will ruin their lives forever, without question. If there's any chance they're pulling in people who aren't actually pedophile rapists, then that's greatly alarming and the show should be stopped.
What do you think?
-Edit-
I'm reading some comments from the people at fark.com and this one was particularly on the dot so I'll just quote it:
"Pedophilia is a mental disorder, it should be saught out and treated, not looked for then arrested for deliberate entrapment, to boost ratings for hambeasts who fear for thier precious little snowflake.
The statistics generally say that someone in your family is going to sexually molest your snowflake. Not some stranger off the internet.
But the show preys on a built in, animalistic fear of 'outsiders'. And who could be more outside than someone on the internet? They belong to no social caste, you can't identify race, creed, or sex. They first appear while the show is busy saying how evil they are.
And even if they're innocent, they're guilty for the rest of thier lives, and will be hounded/attacked/bothered by 'hero' vigilantes for being on sex offender registries."
King Boo Hoo on
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man, fuck the children.
Think of the children,
would you kindly.
Fucking the children is what gets them in trouble in the first place. :P
Exactly.
He didn't follow through, so let's send a bunch of cops to storm his house instead?
Wasn't there one episode of where the guy walked in, the 'girl' or whatever called down from upstairs saying to make himself comfortable or something, and he promptly took off his clothes? In that case, bag 'em and tag 'em. The rest...I think we'd need to know more about how they're finding these guys online and getting them to come over. If it's done by highly trained professionals who are simply mimicking the typical 12 year old girl response, then I'm inclined to believe these guys should be on the hook for something at least. If they are, as you say, actively seducing these guys then there probably is a sense of entrapment. Part of me still thinks that it might turn out as 'good' entrapment, but the law probably doesn't provide for that kind, and probably shouldn't.
twit feed
Well, as to your whole 'go out back and shoot them in the head' theory, it only sounds nice when you put pedophelia in the same category as murder or robbing a bank or something-- criminal activities that you voluntarily chose to do because you think you'll benefit in some way from it.
On the other hand, pedophelia is quickly growing to be more accepted in the 'mental disorder' category rather than 'voluntary crime' category.
I mean, you can still hold the same opinion about them, that they have sex with children so they should be shot anyway for the good of society, but when you're talking about mentally ill people rather than criminals it doesn't really have the same sweet taste of vengeance. Actually, in the early 20th century they were doing things like neutering/castrating (whichever is the term that you can use on humans, i don't know the difference) in order to make sure they didn't have children -- for the good of society. Then Hitler took it one step further (in your direction) and started executing the mentally ill. So... be careful where you tread :-p
It's hard to view things in less than the extreme terms of either it's totally a biological mental disorder they can't control or it's totally a voluntary action they chose to do because they don't care about others. I'm sure it falls somewhere in the middle for a lot of the people on the show. But really, some of the people on the show, it's just really sad, really pathetic. They know what they're doing is wrong, they can't help themselves. They're not evil grinning maniacs, they're trembling pathetic little men who have a problem that seriously needs psychiatric help, and instead they're getting the worst embarassment humanly imaginable on national television. I really cringe and die a little inside anytime I see those folks, stuttering and trembling as they keep repeating they don't know why they're here and they know they shouldn't have come and everything. :-(
I'm thinking Runnning Man?
What was that movie with Arnold?
I liked Bad Boys II.
*he never actually said this.
Haha, that's exactly what I was thinking of when I made that post.
Hmm, that sounds so wrong, probably because it is.
What are you basing this statement on?
Good thing is that just yesterday the SCOTUS determined 5-4 that Louisiana's law that sentenced to death a convicted pedophile to death as a violation of the protection from cruel and unusal punishment. So hopedully now the worst that will occure will be life imprisionment, and hopefully the various states might start including manditory treatment for the convicted.
Shit, does anyone remember the case of Gary Plauche? There was this dude, Jeffery Doucet who raped Gary's son. The police found him, and arrested him.
Then, one day they were taking him through an airport, and Gary was waiting at a telephone booth pretending to be talking. As the police walk by with the pedophile, Gary steps out, produces a handgun and shoots and kills the pedophile right in the head, blowing his brains out, ON LIVE CAMERA (you can find the video on the internet). There was NO doubt at all that Gary Plauche had shot and killed that man.
Gary's punishment? 5 years probation.
Pedophiles are not people.
They show the chat transcripts on the screen for a few seconds during most episodes. Sometimes the men really are active and know what they want and come out and say it. Other times the "kid" ends up coaxing the information out of them, baiting and luring them, pretty much saying everything short of "come here and fuck me" so that the guy has to be the one to say it.
Sometimes looking at it, it looks like when people flirt normally. The thrill to flirting is the uncertainty, for the guy anyway since it's usually on him to act. But I mean that the girl will generally say flirty things or do flirty things that come very close to saying "kiss me" without actually saying it, so that when the guy does, he's 99% sure based on her words and actions that she wants to be kissed, but the uncertainty is still present.
However, say the girl was just fucking with the guy. As soon as he kisses her, she prretends to get angry or astonished or whatever. Well, technically she never told him to kiss her, but by all accounts any spectator would tell you that she was making it clear she wanted it.
I know that's a pretty long analogy but looking at some of the transcripts I get that same feeling, like they do everythin short of saying it, and they do it so precisely and deliberately that it's just not realistic, it's not how it usually happens, which is why the guys always end up saying they knew it was a sting operation.
But here's where it really goes from being just controversial to being wrong. We're not talking about a normal woman chatting with a normal guy and screwing with him in order to make him think she likes him. We're talking about people with mental disorders. Like really serious mental disorders that are very hard to work with and really require psychiatric help. Normal guys fall for girls who just flirt for attention all the time, how fair is it to put a mentally ill guy up against a trained and practiced flirter?
That's really sad :-(
I don't get why pedophiles don't get viewed as mentally ill-- they really don't act/think normally, you can tell pretty immediately something is wrong with them.
I mean, what if they made a show to find schizophrenics instead of pedophiles? How funny would it be to see Chris Hansen making fun of some guy cowering in a corner because he thinks he sees demons?
"Hahah, take a seat right there. What's that? The voices tell you not to sit there? AHAHAHA. Do you hear that America? Voices! We're not editting any of this, there are no voices, he's just making it up! Hahaha, alright bud, what else do you "see", eh?"
...that'd be one real great show, right? [/sarcasm]
Stuff like this is sure to send the thread into a quick death spiral.
True but shows like this fuel a kind of hyper paranoia of sexual predators. I've had people threaten to call the police for eating lunch in a park near a playground. It's to the point where you have to pretend children do not even exist for fear of being labeled a predator. I forget the airline but one wanted to ban men from sitting next to kids traveling alone for godsakes.
Alarmism in all its forms sucks.
Well maybe you shouldn't have been masturbating under your trenchcoat.
They do and they don't. The group they work with, Perverted Justice, barely avoids entrapment the same way vice squads using officers posed as hookers do. They don't initiate anything (the perp has to make first contact and suggest the meet-up) but they do seek out specific chat rooms and, uhm, make them selves very appealing.
All-in-all, I'm mixed in my feelings about the use of such tactics to find sexual predators. I'm quite firm in my belief that TV shows such as these are pure crap and only makes me more disgusted by your average American who can't get enough of shit shows like this.
I think it's an accurate summation of what that chain of events indicates, which is what I assume his whole point is.
The way America sees it (and people who support this type of tactic):
An evil guy chatted up this little kid and tried to have sex with them, but fortunately it was just a show.
However, this ignores that the evil guy isn't talking to a confused and socially awkward 12 year old but an undercover adult trained in seducing men like him. So here's closer to the truth:
An evil guy chatted up an undercover adult who specializes in being, saying, and doing, exactly what evil guys like him want to see and hear until the undercover adult manages to seduce and lure the evil adult into trying to meet, but fortunately it was just a show.
But this too ignores something very important. We're not talking about an evil guy like a robber or murderer. We're talking about a mentally ill guy, more like a schizophrenic. Someone not very smart, very weak-willed, easily convinced, very troubled, with screwed up psychological drives he cannot control. This is a serious mental illness that really needs treatment and trying to just "will it away" really isn't a suitable treatment. So once more, and this time closest to the truth:
A mentally ill guy chatted up an undercover adult who specializes in being, saying, and doing, precisely and specifically what the guy's mental illness makes him vulnerable to, until the undercover adult manages to twist the mentally ill guy's mind around into trying to meet, and unfortunately it's captured all on tape.
twit feed
-Not entrapment
-No underage person does not mean no crime committed
-In Texas, crime is committed as soon as the chat is completed
-TCAP more investigative journalism than law enforcement entertainment
-Judge probably ruled on summary judgment motion (ie. whether or not a jury could legally find NBC at least 1% liable)
-No idea how much the settlement was
-Settlement doesn't indicate any presumption of liability
I defend the show because I love it. My argument might be different if I didn't, but as it stands, there is legal basis for what they do.
that and your lap is not a good resting place for your hotdog when you're not taking a bite
Although I'd rather the death be quick and painless, I'm not TOTALLY vindictive after all.
I don't care why the pedo does it, I just want to ensure it stops getting done. When we find a way to cure pedophilia then I'll advocate more for treatment.
This is why I shouldn't be a judge, I can't be impartial to things like this.
I don't have numbers on hand, but I seem to recall hearing that sex criminals (whether it's rapists, hookers, pedos, etc) are pretty likely to have been abused themselves as children.
Also, there was the story a week or two ago of a, what, 12 or 14 year old who posed as a divorced 19 year old and so far has put two guys in jail by sleeping with them, and seems intent on continuing to sleep with older men. IIRC the 2nd guy actually went to her dad and told her what happened when she told him her real age. It's not all guys in vans telling preschoolers about their awesome candy stashes.
This is such a terrible precident I don't even know where to begin.
Yea, I don't get this. Is sending a death threat legally equivalent to actual murder? If I play an online game with someone in Texas and I inform them of how violently I shall be buttraping them, am I a sex offender?
What? Seriously? This is so idiotic I can't even begin to talk about it. Are you guilty of murder immediately after saying to someone in the midst of a heated argument that you're going to kill them?
</sarcasm>
Guys I am going to buttrape all of you. Alert the fuzz.
It's TExas, anal sex is barely legal there to being with. Took the Supreme Court to make that happen.