Talk about figuring it all out.

Okay, so I’m in a mood this week, and after the chit chat on A’s blog yesterday and how it veered to culpability, I decided to look around the internet for some bizarre cases. Bingo! Found one, and right in my back yard.

So, have you ever heard of the ‘provocative act murder doctrine’? Me either but boiled down here it is:

“The doctrine says that someone who provokes another person to kill can be charged with murder.” Makes sense. I think. This doctrine “originated in 1965 and has been used mainly to convict gang members in Southern California — drive-by shootings are a classic application.” Okay, clearer now.

Defense attorney Angela Carter said, “It creates an unusual situation in which the defendant who did not actually kill anyone can receive the death penalty.”

So here is a snippet of a crime in which the prosecutor is using this theory.

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

“It’s very unreal,” said Judy Hughes, whose son, Renato Hughes Jr. — in an unusual invocation of a complex “vicarious murder” legal theory — is being accused of slaying his boyhood chums, Rashad Williams and Christian Foster. …
Williams, facing a three-year prison sentence for unarmed bank robberies in Danville and Lafayette last year, had been staying with his grandparents in Clearlake since April. On Dec. 7, just after midnight, Hughes and Foster arrived for a visit. ..

The preliminary hearing to determine whether Hughes will go on trial began Jan. 11 and will enter its sixth day today. Testimony has been contradictory and confusing.

According to prosecutor Jon Hopkins, the chief deputy District attorney in Lake County, at some point after 4 a.m., Hughes, Williams and Foster broke into the home where Edmonds was living with his young daughter, fiancee Lori Tyler, her son Dale Lafferty, and an unrelated teen, 16-year-old Justin Sutch. Hopkins maintains the three wanted to steal the medical marijuana used by the unemployed Edmonds, a former tractor mechanic, to combat depression. Police later seized at least 5 pounds from the house.

A free-for-all erupted, according to police, in which one intruder wrestled with Edmonds, one hit Tyler, and another bashed Lafferty with a bat. Edmonds grabbed his 9mm semiautomatic Browning and shot Williams twice in the back and Foster five times. It hasn’t been established whether the shooting began indoors or outside.
When police got there, Williams was lying in the middle of 11th Street, dead, and Foster was dying in bushes 20 yards away.

The Lake County district attorney hasn’t determined whether Edmonds has any criminal liability, but it has charged Mission High graduate Hughes, a 21-year-old clerk at a Trader Joe’s in San Francisco, with two counts of first-degree murder and one count each of attempted murder, robbery, assault with a deadly weapon.”…

It took me a minute to shake out all of the players in this crime gone awful, but I figured out who the provokees and who the provokers were. (Hey, it’s been a long week) So basically, this kid Hugh and his buddies decided to rob a house. And the homeowner, Edmonds, who obviously in fear for his life, and the lives of his family, had a problem with that, shot and killed two of them, and because he was ‘provoked’ to defend himself, his family, and his home, he is not the culpable one here, but the other robber, the one left standing is charged with two counts of first degree murder.

So, how does that sit with you?

(I know how it sits with me. And I’ll give you a leetle hint: you break into my house, threaten me and mine, I’ll shoot your ass where you’re standing.)

You can’t yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater. You can’t talk about bombs in the middle of an airport. Some speech is prohibited because the end result can be fatal.

I am a staunch supporter of the First Amendment. I abide by Voltaire’s statement, “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” In my former life as a legislative consultant, this came in handy. I was a good listener. I didn’t have to be convinced that someone was right or I was right or they were wrong (I, of course, am never wrong) but in the end, our country was founded on the right to speak your mind.

But I’ve found something I can not abide, something that I can not believe is legal, and for the first time, I want to end an individual’s right to free speech because of a huge potential threat. I have a high tolerance for idiocy (I DID work in California State government), but this guy surpassed even my threshold.

Two weeks ago I was in Washington and while my pal Toni Hingleton and I sat in traffic behind a burning car (I kid you not), we were listening to the news. Apparently, an admitted pedophile got his website back up and running by using an out of country ISP–after he was shut down with a U.S.

What would a pedophile be doing with a website, you might hesitate to ask?

Putting up pictures of little girls (which he calls LGs). Posting information about public places where other pedophiles can watch and photograph little girls without being suspected of being the effing perverts that they are.

I am not making this up.

Over at Crime Scene Blog, a great place to waste oodles of time researching (guilty), I found an update on Jack McClellan, the pervert who started the Seattle-Tacoma-Everett Girl Love website. Gee, he’s taken down some of the pictures and he only links to other pictures, but he’s still telling his fellow perverts where to find little girls.

From the above blog:

Jack McClellan, who hosted the “Seattle Tacoma Everett Girl Love” site which was taken down earlier this year, is back again. He is an admitted pedophile who told reporters that he feels he is doing nothing illegal and that he gets “a kind of a high” from being around young girls.

The same blog also took content from the original website (which is no longer up) to show exactly what this pervert is up to:

This was my third visit to this roller rink, and like the previous two, it didn’t disappoint. There wasn’t much of a crowd when I arrived, but it picked up over the next hour or so and the place got quite lively. There were a few LGs that I rated above-average on the 1-10 cuteness scale, but my favorite (a girl I’ve seen here before) came with her father, so I didn’t get a chance to flirt with her. Another thing I noticed here tonight was more men like myself (in their mid-20s or older) who didn’t seem to be associated with anyone, and like me, were just circling the rink with a grin on their face (GL’ers or undercover cops?). The skate session closed at 10, and I left exhausted with sore feet. But the LG sightings of this marathon day weren’t over yet: I later saw two more running around the Mount Vernon Safeway.

The fact is that pedophiles are sick. They are not satisfied with watching little girls. They will attempt to make contact. When the watching and flirting and bumping into kids isn’t enough, they will take it to the next step. They will molest one of these girls.

Sexual abuse destroys lives. Sexual abuse can kill. This is not a harmless website where normal “men” are talking about attractive women. They are talking about being sexually attracted and turned on by pre-pubescent girls.

Crime Library reported on the original website when it was shut down:

The purpose of the web site is to promote consensual hugging and cuddling between men and girls who are aged 3 to 11 and bring pedophiles out of the closet, McClellan told Fox News.

“I guess the main thing is I just think they’re cute, a lot cuter than women,” he said. “I admit there is kind of an erotic arousal there. It makes me happy simply.

Freedom of speech? I think not.

Even if McClellan never rapes a child, what about the hundreds–thousands–of pedophiles who visit his site and use his information? Will McClellan be tried and convicted of aiding and abetting?

The laws must change to catch up with the times. We may not be able to take the website off the Internet, but we can damn well put the sicko responsible for it in jail.