Cultural Vigilantism
By Erik Rush
January 22, 2007
When Joseph Smith kidnapped 11-year-old Carlie Brucia in front of a Florida mall (and a closed circuit video security monitor) in February of 2004, raped her, killed her and discarded her body like a used condom, I responded with a column entitled "Give Him Death", in which I outlined my ambivalence regarding the death penalty, among other things.
"Officially" I am against the death penalty, because, as I said in the column: "I am personally against the death penalty for one reason: I don't trust the state not to execute innocent people. I believe that if one innocent individual is executed, that's one too many."
While I believe that most police and prosecutors take their duties in appropriately solemn fashion, we all know that there are those without conscience, those more devoted to career advancement than law and justice, and who reason that certain individuals "have it coming" whether or not they happen to be guilty of the crime at hand. Thus, I am in favor of life without parole for certain crimes, although I do worry about how legislatures, the judiciary and prison overcrowding can throw a wrench in that one.
My aforementioned ambivalence, and that for which I would make exception, are those crimes (like the Brucia killing) in which there was unequivocal guilt. Sadly, although there many cases of evident unequivocal guilt, there are very few methods by which the state can prove unequivocal guilt, particularly after a suspect "lawyers-up."
Which bring us to Michael Devlin, Missouri's 41-year-old corpulent pizzeria pedophile accused of kidnapping Shawn Hornbeck 4 ½ years ago, and then 13-year-old Ben Ownby on January 8 in Beaufort, Missouri. A tip led authorities to Devlin's suburban St. Louis apartment, where on January 12 they found Hornbeck and Ownby. Devlin, now lawyered-up, has pleaded not guilty to charges of kidnapping Ben Ownby, which I am sure is a major surprise to the reader. He is also charged with kidnapping Shawn in 2002 but has not yet entered a plea.
If one reads newspapers or watches television news at all, it is obvious that there are all manner of irregularities concerning these cases, from Devlin's ability to maintain a double life to questions of why Shawn Hornbeck made no attempts to escape despite having contacts in the community, contacts with police, to his parents willingness to parade him in front of Oprah Winfrey's audience less than a week after his rescue.
Although I do have some of the same voyeuristic, morbid curiosity as the rest of us, I'm not going to get into all that. My greater interest lies in our attitude as a society toward such events and our manifest lack of outrage. I say "manifest" because despite strong verbiage being thrown around, that's about all that's being thrown around -- rather than, say, Michael Devlin being thrown from a window with a good strong chain around his fat neck.
Oh, yes, we have a system of (deteriorating) jurisprudence, and there's the presumption of innocence and all that. Again though, as in the case of Carlie Brucia, we have unequivocal guilt. Devlin abducted the boys. No doubt. In all probability, Hornbeck was his sex slave, and Devlin planned the same fate for Ownby. An angry mob won't have the opportunity to drag him from the jail and summarily execute him, but I'm here to tell you that wistfully regretting that fact doesn't make you a bad person.
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