This is despicable!

Discussion in 'BOARDANIA' started by Joculator, Jun 7, 2009.

  1. Joculator The 'Old' Fool

  2. mazekin Member

    That's horrible! Petition is signed!
  3. DEATHOFRATS New Member

    Well, it's a toss up between animal welfare and welfare of children. It's a tricky area.
  4. TamyraMcG Active Member

    I hope her mother has the sense to get that girl some help, she is sick in the head and maybe the heart as well. Trashing someones home is no kind of joke and "hating cats" is no excuse for hurting one.
  5. Buzzfloyd Spelling Bee

    I never know about issues like this. I agree that the behaviour is totally abhorrent, but, as Tamyra says, the girl needs help. I'm not sure that punishment would be the effective way of preventing this kind of thing in the future, even if it made people feel better about it having happened now.
  6. Joculator The 'Old' Fool

    As I made the original post, maybe I should add a little bit more to clarify my support for this petition.

    World wide, prisons are full to over crowding with sex offenders, paedophiles, murderers and a whole host of other unsavoury characters that the law feels should be separated from society (cruelty to animals may be a lesser offence, but is still considered a crime). Modern society now has a collection of bodies that they consider unworthy of a capital sentence (guilt?), but have the opinion that these people 'need help'.
    The help being - three meals a day, free learning opportunities, colour TV, rights to comfort and nuptual visits by their partners and free health and dental care. (UK as only as far as I know)

    My personal opinion is the punishment can never be too severe for these people and the crimes they have commited. and they should really be removed from the gene pool. They personally considered commiting the crime in the first place and should be prepared to face the punishment, however small nowadays, when they are caught.

    Let's use the hakneyed case of public birching on the Isle of Man as an example... After public birching was banned in the early '70s, the crime rate exploded to an all time high of 800%, above previous averages, within twelve months.

    I appreciate by voicing my personal opinions, I may come up against a lot of arguments but let's keep it in this thread shall we.
  7. Hsing Moderator

    Just a short throw in, for now:
    I don't know about the Isle of Man per se, but the overall crime rates in the USA and Europe don't, contrary to public opinion, go up since the 70ies. In fact they go down, all overall, especially if you take the things out that weren't even considered a crime in some of these countries 40 years ago and stick to things like murder and violent crimes (as, for example, cruelty against animals in many countries wasn't a crime, it was vandalism - an animal was a thing with an owner. "Raping your wife" was considered a paradox, not a crime, people didn't call the police if someone came down on their children with the belt, etc).

    What I'd like to see considered before the debate really starts is that not only our oh so criminal youth, but our societies as a whole, are, in many respects, doing better than they are being given credit for, be it the current generation of parents or the judicial system - there's always enough room for improvement to fit a young continent in, but it seems that if you take a long calm look at the known facts, we can't be doing everything wrong.

    Sure, 70 years ago, punishment would have been harder both in matters of terms as well as when it comes to the living conditions of prisoners. But were we really living in a morally more stable society, or did the treatment of criminals reflect the treatments of the people as a whole?

    I don't want to sound polemic, and I am not directing this at you directly, Joc - because it rather refers to the entire complex this debate usually is a part of than to anything you actually said.

    Lately, I often hear things like "people used to discipline their children more back in the days", "people weren't as morally ambiguous before the sixties", "crimes were at least punished back then", and it really is a very active topic.
    I always feel the strong urge to remind people that, not only in Germany but very much so, people knew damn well about punishment and removing people from the gene pool, and it wasn't a healthier society for it. What I mean is that we often give the past way too much credit and tend to ignore that a lot of the things that are annoying the hell out of us in today's world are correctible bugs compared to the things that improved during the last decades. For example a certain grown sensibility when it comes to the treatment of either animals or children.

    Actually, this is a classic example against the "back in the days, she would have been at least seen punishment". From my knowledge of local history, family history, and studying European history, I'd say I am pretty sure that a few decades ago, neither the authorities nor the world wide press would have cared about a god damned cat*. It would have been considered a cruel prank.

    Actually, putting bags over a cat's claws so it can't fight and climb anymore and throwing it into the next dog kennel was considered a prank classic in many rural areas, not to talk about some of the cat related traditions which ended up badly for the involved feline, such as hunting them, burning them, setting their tails on fire, etc.

    So, even checking out what might be wrong with her instead of a "severe punishment", whatever that would be, is rather a progress. :smile:

    (*You know I love cats, too.)
  8. Joculator The 'Old' Fool

    No offence, inferred or otherwise, taken, and I appreciate and respect your input of ideas to a world wide problem of crime and punishment. Maybe it is because of my age group, (although the 70 years refence may have been a bit harsh :sad: ), that I carry the thoughts of my generation in that 'by today's standards the punishments metered out by the judicial system are of a lesser severity than they used to be'.

    I feel that this topic is going to move well beyond 'baking a cat' but let's face it, small crimes grow into bigger ones.

    There are really two lines of thought in my argument. One is that the judicial system is being less harsh on any offender than it used to be. Secondly, the considered severity of any crime is being dumbed-down; hence the serious punishable crimes of the 60' and 70's are considered to be lesser offences by today's standards.

    In the UK, for example, up until 1965 it was still possible for anyone committed of a capital offence (eg.murder or treason) to be hanged; and indeed the last execution in the UK was in 1964. Nowadays the penalty is what the UK courts call a 'stautory life sentence' of 25 years. This can be shortened considerably (by approximately 33%) for 'good behaviour(?)' whilst serving a sentence. Although it is nice to see that the US courts stil consider a life sentence to mean just that.

    Maybe the whole train of thought of today has become a little bit more tolerant and moved from 'Oo.. that was really naughty of them' to ' Well nobody got hurt, so it isn't too bad'.

    Still, it would be intersting to hear anyone elses's thoughts.
  9. Hsing Moderator

    Well, I am not somebody else in this case because I've already had my say, but as usually, that doesn't stop me. :razz:

    *lol* Sorry, but that's the usual time frame people spontaneously give.... 30 to 70 years.

    I am actually a bit torn about this, more often so than my previous post might indicate.

    On the one hand, as I've tried to explain, I think that some of the things we find despicable today would have gone unpunished only few decades ago - let's say, in the 70ies. Various forms of child abuse for example would have gone unpunished because they were too taboo to even be investigated. The same goes for all forms of domestic violence, but also cruelty against animals - it was frowned upon, but not usually prosecuted. A lot of the things we see as youth violence today, no matter how serious the problem is, would have been regarded as a "thing among children", cruel pranks, or been punished within the school system only. (In Germany for example, it was expected, especially of male children, to be able to stand brutal bullying, be a bully, or no one would show you respect enough to help you out even if it got physically violent.)

    On the other hand, I see severe imbalances that make it almost impossible to defend the judicial system as a whole - I think, for example, that harming a person is often not punished hard enough when compared with punishments for vandalism or theft.
    The German judicial system seems to have inherited the imbalance between punishments of crimes against a person's health and life and punishment against a person's belongings (because those who had belongings were rich enough to defend their own physical well being, and still deserved more protection from the lower classes).

    A few years ago, a German judge put a woman behind bars after she'd scratched and damaged several cars, and a month later, a guy in my hometown raped a sixteen year old girl and got two years on parole, which means he didn't spend a single day behind bars despite confessing in the face of several witnesses. The prosecution (!) called it a "chain of unlucky events" (he'd consumed drugs and apparently those drugs kept him from noticing her pleads and cries.)

    These examples are often brought up in a polemic context, but they are there, and they are built into the system. Even if I am all about improving people, a system that in itself doesn't send the right moral message -for example that the mental health of a 16 year old girl is worth more than a few repairable cars- cannot do that.

    Even if that were true, no judicial system that deserves the name can punish crimes a person didn't yet commit, or we would, in the extreme, soon be back at sending maidens to prison for stealing a spoon. (You English people can hardly try to send them all to Australia anymore, can you? :razz:)

    Still, it may be the case with many, particularly violent or sadistic people - one crime just the prelude to the next etc. On the other hand there is the "typical" case of the "violent youth" - statistics say male and in their early twenties - who often do stop their behaviour later in life and become relatively peaceful citizens, so to say. In their cases, not doing any more damage to their personalities might actually be the most productive thing for society - a pragmatic concept, depending on the nature of the crime, and not something just "soft".

    Whatever works best should be allowed - and in those countries where rehabilitation is taken seriously, it is practiced on those groups with quite some success. I can dig out the facts, but I am already rambling. :redface:

    But do our countries take rehabilitation seriously? Did they ever? I am not so sure. There may be three meals a day, there may be colour TV, but we live around the corner of a relatively "infamous" youth prison. The conditions aren't all that great, with too many people in one cell, violence among inmates, suicides etc. And, as said, that's a youth prison. The ideas of rehabilitation might have been there, and many of them might have made sense, but it seems they made an unholy alliance with the lethargy of an underpaid, overloaded judicial system in serious need of an updated moral code.

    (There's another system error in a lot of judicial systems - the fact that crimes are being punished differently depending on who committed them, not the damage they caused or what motivated them.
    The current examples of managers stealing millions, and not spending a day in jail, as opposed to the petty thief who gets three years, come to mind. These examples make it very hard to defend the system at times or even discuss it objectively. But starting out by punishing only the burglar more harshly wouldn't weigh things out here. This particular imbalance is one of the reasons why I am against death punishment, the other being that it is irreversable.)
  10. mazekin Member

    I meant to post this earlier, but I didn't have a chance before now.

    When I was 17, I was finished school and working. In my eyes, I was an adult, and in my parents and bosses eyes too. 17 is old enough to know that baking!!! physically taking a cat, placing it in an oven and turning it on is wrong. 15 is old enough to know that baking a cat is wrong. 12!!! is old enough to know that baking a cat is wrong.

    She fled the apartment because "She didn't want to hear the cat crying and scratching at the oven door" She knew what she was doing was wrong. Any reasonable, normal person would know that what they were doing was wrong.

    I was going to write another long-winded bit about how if she was old enough to live out of home with a roommate (not knowing her status, she could have been kicked out of home, or other equally sad and horrible things) but I did a google search on her name and found this:

    Cheyenne Cherry - dog-napping

    I'm sorry, but so far as I'm concerned, if her crimes aren't dealt with seriously now, she'll be in jail for something much worse when she is legally an adult. She needs a nice sharp shock by having the rug pulled out from under her feet by being tried as an adult. Wipe that smug grin off her face and let her realise that there are consequences for her actions. If not, what's next? A baby in a microwave? A kidnapping with a real gun? Armed robbery? Murder?

    ----------------------------------

    I could also tell you about my cousins who were little tearaways (joyriding and crashing their mothers brand new car, dangling a cat over the stairs by its tail, fracturing the other brother's skull with an aluminium baseball bat, stealing alcohol, smoking; and all before the age of 12) but I won't get into the whole thing. Suffice to say, their mother didn't ever discipline them properly, was over-indulgent and let them get away with everything. Up to and including breaking an entire row of alcohol bottles in an empty function room - they were using them as target practice. Little gurriers.

    It's not too late for her to learn, but she'll need to learn quickly before she ends up in dire straits.

    Just my 2 cents.
  11. Buzzfloyd Spelling Bee

    Precisely. And, as Hsing has already touched on, most statistics show that imprisonment creates repeat offenders, while probation and rehabilitation work are far more effective at reintegrating someone into society with acceptable standards of behaviour, especiallly young people. Countries with capital punishment also have higher levels of murder and violent crime. Even before we get to the ethical issues, I am simply not convinced that punishment is the effective option - unless your purpose is making the wronged feel better, rather than preventing the bad thing happening again. I think it's better to see the human and understand what made them that way, so we can stop the same thing from happening with other humans.

    Having known people who work in prisons and in the probation services, and some ex-cons (including one recidivist troublemaker who was always in and out of jail, and who shared our home for a while when I lived with my parents), I can assure you that prison is not a soft option, colour TVs be damned. How does having a colour TV negate bullying, abuse and loss of human rights? Nor is rehabilitation a soft option. There is no easy way of teaching someone how to be different so they can fit in society, but some ways are more effective than others - and seeing that they need help to do it is the first step, in my opinion.
  12. DEATHOFRATS New Member

    A prison sentence should be handed out as a punishment, but what she needs is help. Those saying she needs a short, sharp shock and cannot just get away with a slapped wrist - I see your point. But what the judge in a trial is trying to do is get the best for everyone. a punishment is all very well, but could she then ever be reintroduced to society on equal terms?

    Whereas, with rehabilitation and psychological help, perhaps she could come to see why people don't go around baking kittens, kidnapping dogs and holding people at gunpoint. I am sure that action needs to be taken, but punishment breeds resentment, resentment breeds anger, and anger breeds repeat offenders.
  13. TamyraMcG Active Member

    She is apparently already a repeat offender and hopefully something can be done to stop her from degrading farther. Jeffrey Daumer began his career by killing animals and so did other serial killers. Cheyenne Cherry has a very strange idea of what a practical joke is and a very limited appreciation of what other peoples rights are. i hope she has some idea of how horrendous her behavior is viewed and that this alone makes her think, but I do think she needs to stand trial as an adult and be dealt the punishment that doing a crime deserves, maybe not prison, but some sort of service that would benefit society might be called for.

    I thought at first maybe working in a pound might be the thing but i am not so sure now. I do wonder how she can possibly be a responsible pet owner and be able to steal a dog from someone else, much less be able to put a kitten in an oven. I read some of the comments on the story about the dognapping and some of those folks seem a little unhinged and insensitive to the lady with the name Cherry who was objecting to getting hate email that was directed toward Cheyenne. I signed the petition but I do not think it proper to send hatemail. It just seems wrong to me.maybe not as wrong as what she is accused of but some of those comments were pretty extreme and I imagine some of the emails were even worse.
  14. Roman_K New Member

    She's 17. People should receive professional help whenever possible, but frankly... this isn't a child. This is an adult who knew precisely what she was doing, and didn't care one bit. If breaking and entry, vandalism, theft and animal cruelty is this woman's idea of a prank, then she's a danger to society.

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