Verdict in Steubenville Case

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The closest definition of irony to how you're using it is "when a sequence of events plays out contrary to what would be expected", but since rapists go to prison (when caught) and prisoners get raped, irony is incorrect even if using this definition because events played out as expected.

I can understand if you take offense to the "Justice" part of "poetic justice", but that isn't what irony means. Maybe "poetic punishment"?

So, popular football players that rape an innocent girl get only two years in kiddie jail, while hackers that publish academic papers get treated like terrorists and are subject to 35 years in federal prison?

What is wrong with this picture?

Hey, the DOD needs some leverage to recruit good hackers. How else are we going to get the white hats we need, without a national draft? (/sarcasm)

No offense taken. Poetic justice is a good description. In which case the justice would be dramatic and not based on the right or wrong of the act.

Or more likely just play cards, eat junkfood, watch football, and occasionally get in fights. Might get extorted, though.

When they get out of juvenile detention they'll be right back at it.

Yeah, they already got cheerleader groupies ready to blow 'em and defend their "honor."

Sorry, but no. A fire is a fire. It has got no mind and no feelings. A fire has to do, what a fire does according to physic. It cant choose to do what it wants to do. So if I put my hands into fire, it will burn because fire burns. Not because it choose to burn me.

But human are no fire. Comparing humans to fire, means that every human on this earth would be forced to be an a**hole. But they aren´t. Instead of fire, we can choose if we want to burn others or not. It is our personal decision. No one else can decide for us, if we want to burn and hurt others or not. So noone else can be made responsible for someone elses desicion to burn and hurt another person. And noone can see into our thoughts what we decide to do. There is no blame to that girl, because this girl did not choose to get burnt, she choose to go to a normal party to have fun. While these others choose to exploit a normal party to burn and hurt, not because they are fire and cant choose otherwise, but because they wanted to be fire out of their own desicion, not asking the girl about her opinion.

Its not the girl that was not supposed to be there, that should not be allowed to visit normal a normal party, because of not knowing how to behave when visiting a party. It was these guys. Blaming the girl means to excuse the guys and them being responsible for their decision. So sure, blaming the guys afterwards, dont change anything that happens. But blaming the girl is like kicking into an victim, that is already lying on the floor. And this is not fair. As the behavior of your family was definitely not fair in any way. If someone deserves to be kicked afterwards, its the aggressors and the ones blaming the victim.

There's a big difference between saying the punishment was too lenient and saying that they should be raped. I hope you're in the former camp and not the latter.

Macbeth and his charming wife chose to murder for the sake of their ambition.

This girl was drugged (probably)

Drunk.

Throwing up.

Unable to walk.

Unable to speak intelligibly.

Clearly helpless.

Set up for a pre-planned gang rape and public humiliation.

When people outside the teen-age cliques and the football team heard what had happened, and that pictures, videos, messages existed, an assistant coach phoned everyone on the team ordering them to delete all evidence.

She targeted or set up or hurt no one.

She was apparently a trusting, naive, little fool who watched too many Disney movies when she was younger, and following Anne Frank's philosophy, believes that:

"People are basically good."

Well, they are not, and Ann Frank and this assault victim found that out, didn't they?

Sylkat

I'm not quite sure myself. There's a very big part of me that says they deserve it, and I know I wouldn't lose any sleep if they were, but at the same time I hold rape as a special kind of evil.

Either way, they should be spending a hell of a lot more time behind bars. Say, fifteen or twenty years.

How does that make a difference?
Are we to believe that men will take rape more seriously if these young men are sent behind bars for twenty years?
Will confining these men for that length of time make any woman in the United States safer from those handful of men who won't adhere to standards of decent behaviour?
It seems to me that fifteen or twenty years is simply an emotional reaction that says, "one year isn't enough." There's no rationale behind that statement other than a feeling of impotence.

They are now branded as sexual offenders, and forever will be. They will be forever deprived of full participation in society, because their criminal record will always impose restrictions upon them. They are notorious, and will likely remain so. Why would 14 more years incarceration make any substantive difference?

Now, I don't disagree that one year may be too lenient. But I think arguing about one year, three years, five years or fifty years is a fool's game. Rather than seeking to heap disdain on offenders--which will never undo their offenses, isn't it better to look at how we might prevent offenses like this in the future?

^^^
and how might that be accomplished?

Dear Visagrunt,
Why shouldn't they be branded as sexual offenders?

This was not a drunk teenager getting 'carried away', this was repeated assaults, posing for pictures and videos, being told by two of their friends that what they did was wrong, answering "It's okay", this was a crime.

Sylkat

I don't think he's saying they shouldn't be, he's just pointing out that this is not a small punishment in and of itself.

So nobody deserves to get raped but rapists deserve their balls ripped out? How have you reached this conclusion? What makes one so different from the other?



There are a lot of different situations when one could be raped. Would you say your husband was right if you were raped because you took a walk in the woods on your own, or took an elevator, or someone broke into your house? What if you did something that was genuinely stupid but well intentioned, like accepting someone's offer to drive you home if your car broke down? Being raped does not mean one put oneself in a situation where it's likely. And where do you draw the line between responsibility and looking to be raped? Frankly, I think that was a horrid thing for your husband to say, and I hope he didn't really mean it. It's that kind of thinking that people use to justify raping women who leave their house without wearing a burqa or even at all. Can you confidently say that you avoid any situation in which you could be raped?



Because no matter what they do, they won't be able to change that. They're teenagers, teenagers do stupid irresponsible cruel things and grow up to be decent people all the time. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's no big deal, or that they're decent people now. I'm saying they could change. Is that more likely to happen if they're locked in a box with a bunch of other stupid cruel teenagers, then forced to spend the rest of their lives as second-class citizens? I doubt it. Are they guaranteed to still deserve that when they're 50 years old? Maybe, maybe not.