On court-sanctioned liberty from prison, a convicted rapist in Switzerland killed the therapist who was accompanying him to reintegration therapy, fled the country, and was eventually captured by German police just across the Polish border a few days later.
Let’s see where the Swiss court system could have possibly gone wrong, and play “spot the error”:
- A 39-year-old man close to his physical prime, with a history of several violent rape offenses, gets to leave the prison for court-approved therapy.
- The therapist they assign to him is a young, attractive female.
- The rehabilitation therapy sessions take place at an equestrian center, to which the young, pretty therapist drives the offender without any police escort or other chaperone.
- On the way to the equestrian center, they stop at a knife store, where the convicted rapist has been cleared to purchase a hoof scraper knife, to be used for care of his therapy horse.
- Instead of a knife suitable for hoof-scraping, the violent rapist purchases a knife better suited for cutting and stabbing.
- They never arrive at the equestrian center, and the body of the therapist is found a short time later near Geneva, her throat cut.
Sending a known violent rapist out for reintegration therapy with only a pretty female therapist and then allowing him to purchase knives? Holy shit, Switzerland. I grew up in Germany, so I know a lot of “judicial offender mollycoddling” stories, but this one takes the cake.
How do they treat alcoholics there? Letting them drive to their therapy sessions in a car where “Rehab” plays on repeat, then allowing them to stop at the liquor store (“…but remember, only buy a bottle opener!”), and having them escorted by a giant anthropomorphic martini glass?
I had fun imagining him making it to Poland and being caught there. I have to they have a more, um, “business-like” approach to penology.
I am wondering if the young therapist actually believed she could fix this guy by letting him hug his state provided horse, or was told to do her job despite her reservations about him ……
As for mollycoddling ….. look up Nikko Jenkins in Nebraska ….. sentenced to a couple of decades for armed robbery, he did less than 10 years (good time credit, doncha know?) despite assaulting a guard and fellow inmates- biting the ear off one guy ….. and telling everybody, includin a judge (in writing) that he was crazy and “they’d hear about him soon” …. he wasn’t out 3 weeks and killed 4 people in a 10 day span ….. you have got to see the picture of this guy, and imagine him sitting there telling everybody he is nuts and they are going to see him on the news ……. and they let him out anyway.
Who’d a thunk it: All the guy needed was a horse, and everything would have been all right ……. or not ……
Ay yai yai. Um, just, yeah. Like RabidAlien said, if you tried to make this into a book, even c*ssler and L*dlum’s editors would send it back for lack of believable plot. Unless the offender was a secret assassin and his handler (who happened to get on the parole board) needed him to commit one last attack, and . . . nah. Not even.
Watched a documentary on Canadian prison systems versus US. They had one group of three guys, at least one of whom was a convicted murderer, in a Canadian low security setting.
It was basically a three bedroom bungalow (complete with kitchen. . . which was complete with a full set of kitchen knives), and the “perimeter fence” was a knee high garden fence.
Because they figured that, regardless of what they were convicted of, THESE particular offenders were unlikely to run. Maybe their penologists are nearly 100% on identifying the ones who will try to break out, but I’d kind of like at least as much security as on a pay parking lot in DC. . .
I can’t even make fun of this without wanting to beat somebody with a tee-ball bat until their ears bleed Emmental.
Huh, this indentation on my desk looks remarkably like my forehead. I don’t remember there being so many stars in here either.
Wow. Ya know, if I’d read that scenario in a book, I would have put the book down and not bothered to finish it, thinking that the author was stretching for a plot twist and probably strained something between his/her ears. Seriously…that scenario is beyond bad fiction.