by Charles
Joseph Edward Duncan III, the previously convicted sex offender who was arrested for kidnapping two young children (and murdering one of them) and suspected of bludgeoning to death their mother, older brother and mother’s boyfriend, had a weblog according to this report by Associated Press.
Convicted sex offender Joseph Edward Duncan III spent months on the Internet documenting his internal struggle over right vs. wrong. Then, four days before two Idaho children he is accused of kidnapping disappeared, he wrote: "The demons have taken over."
It was one of the last entries in Duncan’s Weblog before the 42-year-old North Dakota man was arrested and charged this week with two kidnapping counts. Authorities believe he took 9-year-old Dylan Groene and 8-year-old Shasta Groene from their Idaho home shortly before their 13-year-old brother, mother and her boyfriend were bludgeoned to death May 16. Police say Duncan also is a suspect in the killings.
It’s called Blogging the Fifth Nail. Four days before the murders/kidnappings, Duncan wrote an entry titled The Demons Have Taken Over. An excerpt:
They’ve locked up the "Happy Joe" person in the same dungeon that "Happy Joe" kept them in for so many years. Now they are loose and I am very afraid.
Two days before the murders/kidnappings, Duncan is still confused:
As far as "taking people with me" well, I don’t know if that is right or wrong. In fact, I don’t know much any more what right and wrong even is. My view is either everything is right (in some regard) or everything is wrong (in some other regard).
Maybe it’s just me, but I would put quadruple-murder and raping young children firmly in the "wrong" category. His final paragraphs:
I wish I could be more honest about my feelings, but those demons made sure I’d never be able to do that. I might not know if it matters, but just in case, I am working on an encrypted journal that is hundreds of times more frank than this blog could ever be (that’s why I keep it encrypted). I figure in 30 years or more we will have the technology to easily crack the encryption (currently very un-crackable, PGP) and then the world will know who I really was, and what I really did, and what I really thought. Also, maybe then they will understand that despite my actions, I’m not a bad person, I just have a disease contracted from society, and it hurts a lot.
I hope to complete this journal before I die (soon) or turn myself in (I still might do that, I think it is the right thing, but of course, I’m not sure).
Speak of being sure; I wish I could be sure about my thoughts. But right now the only thing I’m sure about is that I’m sure about nothing. It is not a good position to be in considering my circumstances (being a felony fugitive and all).
Did Duncan’s parole officers know about his blog? I’m not sure. One thing we know. Registering Duncan with local authorities and periodic monitoring didn’t do a damn bit of good. Despite claiming on his blog that he would never re-offend, it happened.
It’s not just you. It’s me too.
But it’s only the two of us.
Yes, this is a horrific piece of reality.
I think he’s just been laying the groundwork for an insanity defense, meself.
I think he’s just been laying the groundwork for an insanity defense, meself.
God, I hate this kind of stuff, because I always end up saying something that gives someone else the leverage to say “AHA! U DEFEND CHILD MURDERERS!!”
What this shows, more than anything, is that the justice system is not properly set up to deal with insanity. Yes, what this person did was bad and wrong, but — as with von’s post on terrorism — simply labelling this act “wrong” doesn’t help us a single iota when it comes to prevention.
If his mind was sick, he should have been treated as a person with an sick mind. This doesn’t mean treating people gently, it means treating them appropriately.
If so many people on juries didn’t think that “insanity” was some kind of creepy ‘get out of jail free’ card for murderers and rapists, put there by libruls because we want to see rapists go free (feel the love, there’s no real right and wrong!), we wouldn’t try and fit psychopaths into a system that’s not designed to deal with them.
See? This is exactly what I mean!
If you plead insanity, the chances are that you’ll serve longer than if you didn’t, and you’ll be subject to examination by an actual psychology professional who’ll be able to flag up if you’re actually six strings short of a guitar.
What if the guy really is insane? What about that, eh? Do we label him “evil” and be done with it?
Dividing the world into neat black and whites is very nice, but you can’t administer a government based on that kind of thing, because “evil” has no practical response.
Washington State has set up a program that gives special treatment to high risk sex offenders, and it has proved to be a very difficult thing from a public policy perspective.
First off, child molestation is not a crime that merits life in prison under the statutes. I guess for some offenders this is OK (but what do I know?), but for the recidivists it is a source of public outrage (among other things).
The state passed a law which mandated that high risk offenders be confined for a period of treatment until they were deemed to be cured. This was politically popular, among other things. After many years and no graduates of the program, some of the inmates sued the state, saying that the state intended to graduate no one and keep them locked up forever.
The judge reviewed the program and found that inmates claims had some merit, as the state had not set up the apparatus for eventual rehabilitation. Among the failings was that there was no half way house for offenders who had graduated from the confinement portion of their treatment.
The state then went to find a location for a half way house. Local politicians would have rather hosted a leper colony or stored nuclear waste than accept this half way house.
After much gnashing of teeth, a location was chosen.
I’m all for keeping these guys locked up, but I am concerned about a proceedure that grafts decades upon their court mandated sentences without the benefit of a judge and a jury.
The media always says sex offenders have the highest re-offense (?) rate. If that’s true, there’s no sense letting them on parole at all. Unless we can neuter them before they’re released into the wild. *heartless*
“Do we label him “evil” and be done with it?”
No, I say execute him (crazy or not) then we are done with it.
I have what I hope is an unusual take on this. I once had a friend who spent about two years being quite seriously homicidal. (Not in any way that involved sex abuse or anything.) Part of the problem was that he was extremely isolated, and I was one of the very few people he was talking to (a) at all, and (b) about this. Which means that I spent those two years trying to keep him from killing anyone.
Now: as non-psychiatrists go, I was probably not the worst person this could have happened to: I have done high-stakes counseling before, and had, before this, talked several people out of homicide. But that was on a battered women’s hotline; those people basically just wanted to abuse to stop, and all I had to do was provide them with an alternative way of achieving this. My friend was a different matter entirely; and much, much harder. And I was horribly, vividly aware of how clueless I was about what to do.
It turns out that there is no place I could find to turn to for guidance. If you go to the bookstore, you can find shelves full of books on how to keep your friends and relations from killing themselves, but nothing at all on how to keep them from committing homicide. (I suspect liability issues.) I tried consulting psychiatrists, calling suicide hotlines to see whether they knew anything, reading scientific journals, everything I could think of, and nothing was the least bit useful. So I was left to make it up as I went along, which was terrifying.
Moreover, there is nothing one can do, really, other than: (a) talk to the person, (b) try to convince the person to go into therapy (it took me two years to do this, and I had to cut an extremely unpleasant deal to do it), and (c) trying to involuntarily commit the person. So if you’re dealing with someone who refuses to see a psychiatrist, but who hasn’t yet reached the point where you can successfully get him or her committed, you’re on your own. And that covers a lot of territory, some of it extremely scary.
At one point, I had what I thought was a very good idea. If the person in question did try to kill someone, I thought, he would almost certainly use a gun; and he was not street-smart enough to get one illegally. So: would it be possible to keep him from getting a gun license? I had a bunch of extremely explicit homicidal emails in my possession, so I contacted the relevant gun licensing bureau and said: look. There’s this homicidal person who may try to get a gun license. I have evidence, which I’d be glad to give you; and I’d also be glad to give you whatever permission you need to go rooting around my email account, my college’s servers, etc., to try to verify where it came from, if it would help him not get a license. But no: they don’t deny gun licenses for that reason. And he subsequently got one, along with the gun.
The absence of any steps that one could take, or at least any that I could find, and I looked pretty hard, was also terrifying to me, and made me vow never again to ask myself, when someone went postal, where were that person’s friends and family? Since what I took away from that experience was: they could have been trying their hardest and getting nowhere.
My friend is now fine, and (for various reasons I don’t want to go into), while I never like to predict anything, especially about people’s psyches, I am reasonably confident this won’t happen again. It was the psychiatrist, and medication, that did the trick. But it was absolutely terrifying, and all the more so since, as I said, there was neither guidance to be found nor, as far as I could tell, steps to be taken, other than trying to talk him through it, without any particular reason to think I’d succeed, and knowing all along that I was flying completely blind.
I don’t know what steps should be available between trying to talk someone into therapy and involuntary commitment, but surely there should be something.
Interesting story hilzoy, I had a similar experience with someone who became seriously and dangerously paranoid–but I’ll have to get in to that when I have more time. His issues were also resolved mostly with psycho-active drugs and with him ceasing to smoke pot.
Washington state also has an amazing interactive map website (sorry, I don’t know how to link, but if you want to see it, googling to it is easy), which shows all registered sex offenders, color coded by their “level” of danger. Sort of an electronic scarlet letter. Having worked with large property managers, I can tell you that this status makes it very difficult for them to rent around here. Short of killing or neutering them as suggested above, I don’t have a clue what the solution is.
Ah, the civilised solution.
Actually, executing him simply points how it is a purely retributive act, since concern about dying seems to have had zero deterrent value on this character.
Also, since the point of this post seems to be about what could have been done in advance to prevent tragedy, the form of punishment seems somewhat irrelevant.
No, I say execute him (crazy or not) then we are done with it.
Sulla, he is someone’s brother and/or son. And if he were yours we could test your resolve here.
“Ah, the civilised solution”
Civilized or not it is the 100% guarantee against recidivism, which is the only solution I care about.
Wilfred- If one of my brothers did something this monstrous I’d flick the switch myself for no other reason than the dishonor he brought to my family.
Old law is often the best law.
Of particular relevance here:
Sulla is an old Roman, of course, so his response is entirely in character.
My own feeling is that we’re nowhere near understanding, let alone fixing, what is wrong with a real child molester (to distinguish someone who commits stat rape with a 15YO who looks like a 17YO). Thus, I don’t see what basis we can have for setting them free. It’s already too late when we catch one of these unfortunates crossing the line, so letting them back out after that seems deeply unwise.
Is anyone other than me worried by the idea of preventive imprisonment? (I mean, by Sulla’s logic, we should just wipe out the human race, thereby solving our problems with crime once and for all.)
Hilzoy: Is anyone other than me worried by the idea of preventive imprisonment?
In a sense, all imprisonment is preventive; that’s a classic rationale for punishment.
But we can distinguish between, say, locking up everyone whose DNA makes them 60% likely to molest children (assuming such a link existed), and locking up everyone who’s actually molested a child.
The latter is punitive but also preventive. And no, I don’t have the slightest problem locking such a person up for the rest of his life, except for wondering whether it’d be more merciful to shoot him.
So please explain which kind of preventive imprisonment bugs you, Hilzoy.
What is preventive about executing someone who kidnapped, molested and murdered a child whether he had voices in his head or not?
Short of some sort of chemical castration, I doubt there’s any way of preventing recidivism in child molestors.
I think child molestors, in general, are sick in the sense that they can’t help/prevent children from sexually arousing them (nor can anyone else control whatever sick, or not so sick, things excite them), but not necessarily deranged. I don’t see how an insanity plea applies to the majority of these cases.
Summary execution is a very slippery slope, though. While I agree that something harsh is called for in this case (life in prison, as I’m a death penalty opponent), there are many activities/pastimes that would have been met with the death penalty in the past that we’ve since become more tolerant of.
Dealing with child molestors is probably one of the most difficult things we, as a society, can do. No answers that I’ve seen seem to be a “good” solution for dealing with this.
Sulla: What is preventive about executing someone who kidnapped, molested and murdered a child whether he had voices in his head or not?
Well, it’s preventive in part, wouldn’t you agree? “Won’t be molesting any more children,” they say.
I suppose but the idea is he would be executed for a crime he committed and that crime was so heinous he forfeited his rights to exist amongst our society. In other words he crossed a line we never will allow him to approach again.
No quarrel there, but there’s no reason why punishment can’t be overdetermined, & I suspect that in most people’s minds it already is, in some mixture of retribution and prevention.
I suppose but the idea is he would be executed for a crime he committed and that crime was so heinous he forfeited his rights to exist amongst our society.
But in an insanity case, the question is whether a crime was committed. A successful insanity defense means that the person was not legally capable of holding the mental state required for his act to constitute a crime. The thought is that “heinous” and “forfeit” and the like are inappropriate concepts to apply to someone who is incapable of functioning as a moral actor.
Insanity cases are really, really hard. I’m very much with McDuff in being troubled by the casual ignorance with which so many people dismiss insanity defenses. At the same time, when someone suffers from mental illness severe enough to be a serious risk to others, it takes a tremendous amount of work to have even a chance of a good outcome, and in far too many cases the resources just aren’t there. A few years back I was somewhat involved in a situation like that that ended well, which seemed like (and was) a triumph for reason and decency. But as I look back on what it took to achieve that result, and at the vast gap between what we were able to do and what would have been possible for most people in that situation, I’ve come to think that in a great many cases, there is almost no chance that the person is going to be treated effectively for the mental illness, and a criminal conviction is not necessarily the worst of the very ugly set of possible outcomes.
I agree with Sulla 100%.
Until we find a way to really cure sex offenders I propose the death penalty.
If we spent as much time, money and energy into sexual predators and human slavery, as we do in the drug war…
I think…
but the horrible truth is that there is no real money to be made in defending children and helping sexual psychopaths. But there is money to be made in the drug wars.
If we spent as much time, money and energy into sexual predators and human slavery, as we do in the drug war…
I think…
But the horrible truth is that there is no real money to be made in defending children and helping sexual psychopaths. But there is money to be made in the drug wars.
One of the most shocking things about prison is the amount of drug offenders there are. The billions we spend locking up dope fiends and potheads and criminalizing whole populations…compare the numbers, how many detectives are chasing stoners and tweakers compared to the number chasing sexual predators? The budgets for two?
Damn! This whole story, the little sister and the little brother…like the original Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales…
And those of you demanding evil for evil, you can’t cure anything if you are killing off the patients!
And the majority of these “monsters” were the same little children you all are trying to defend now…many of these victims we mourn for now, will grow up to do this to others.
Let’s hang the victims also, Sulla–since theyy will most likly feed the future sexual-psychopaths?
Sorry, this whole story realy flipped me out.
Neodude,
There is no cure for this as of today. We wouldn’t allow a sick man with some highly contagious and deadly disease loose on the population. Neither should we let loose sexual predators.
Maybe resorting to the death penatly is extreme (having small children can do that to you) but at a minimum sexual felons should be locked up for life.
I hate to be the bleeding heart liberal, but when I think about cases like this, I really shudder at talk of death penalty and life imprisonment.
Before we go too wild with the life imprisonment/death penalty stuff, maybe we should do some basic research. It took me all of 10 seconds with Google to find this:
“Public concern about recidivism by sex offenders, however, is in contrast with the relatively low levels of sexual reoffending that are in fact the case….These studies suggest that less than one in five of a general sample of sex offenders released from prison go on to commit a further sex offence…. Such low reoffending rates are in contrast with recidivism studies in released male prisoners in general amongst whom reoffending rates are in the range of 50% over two years and 60% over four…”
IANACriminologist, so I don’t know how reliable this particular article is, but the first page of search results turned up several documents with similar figures. So if you tough-on-sex-crime folks are basing your arguments on a high recidivism rate rather than the nature of the crime itself, this should at least give you pause.
“…and then we could chop your hands off if you stole anything, so you could only ever steal twice…”
I’m against the death penalty because it’s not unknown for us to lock up and kill the wrong people, especially those who are mentally ill and incapable of mounting a proper defense.
Is having your son incorrectly killed by the state because he was assumed to be a sex offender any better for a parent to endure?
“Public concern about recidivism by sex offenders, however, is in contrast with the relatively low levels of sexual reoffending that are in fact the case….These studies suggest that less than one in five of a general sample of sex offenders released from prison go on to commit a further sex offence…. ”
From the wording I would suspect that there is a big difference between ‘sex offender’ and what we normally think of as ‘child molestor’.
Sex Offender to Be Charged With Murder
Prosecutors said Monday that a convicted sex offender accused of kidnapping two young children would
From the wording I would suspect that there is a big difference between ‘sex offender’ and what we normally think of as ‘child molestor’.
I would bet that a lot of the sex offenders in the non-recidivist group are not child molesters, and in many cases are 17-19 year olds who have sex with 14-16 year olds, which should be illegal, but not deserving of some life-long criminal records.
But the chances of rehabilitating somebody who rapes and murders little kids, I would think are parctically nil and that person must be removed from society either by death sentence or life imprisonment without parole.
And as an extra anecdote that will probably damn me in everybody’s minds, I remember at a music festival (many, many years ago – way past the statute of limitations I hope), I had almost rounded the bases, so to speak. While engaging in small talk, trying to ascertain a little personal history and the contraceptive situation, my new friend declared, “I’ve had such a great time this weekend, my friends even let me drive part of the way.”
Well, even though I backed WAY OFF after that, including having to come up with a weaselly acceptible answer to the question, “What’s the matter, don’t you like me anymore?”, I had already engaged in behavior that in the eyes of the law would make me a sex offender.
Now, as a dad of a next-year-sophomore teenage girl, I worry like crazy about her high school friends and what she is doing (even though she is clearly on an even keel so far), but if something did happen now, god forbid, with those terrible, evil teenage boys, it isn’t like her childhood has been stolen from her.
My son on the other hand wasn’t really interested enough in the boy-girl stuff to actually do something about it until his senior year, thank goodness, and then it was with his senior classmates.
Anyway, I think that there is a huge possibilty of error both in adminstering harsh judgements against kids, and in letting evil creeps go free.
KenB, was there any breakdown of either the types of sex offenders or the type of treatment (if any) they received in prison?
From my abnormal psych class, the treatment outcomes for some types of offenders:
1. Situtaional, heterosexual pedophilia: 95.6% (n=3,012) met the criteria for success.
2. Predatory pedophilia, heterosexual: 88.3% (n=864)
3. Situational pedophilia, homosexual: 91.8% (n=717)
4. Predatory pedophilia, homosexual: 80.1% (n=596)
5. Rape: 75.5% (n=543)
The criteria for success in this study were defined as: completing all treatment sessions (anyone who didn’t was counted as a failure), reporting no covert or overt deviant sexual behaviour at the end of treatment or at any follow-up session; demonstrated no sexual arousal to children or rape situations (greater than 20% on the penile plethsmyograph) at the end of treatment or any follow-up session; had no repeat legal charges for any sexual crime at the end of treatment or at any follow-up session; follow-up continued for 5 years.
(From a study by Barry Maletzky; Treating the sexual offender (1991) and “The paraphilias: Research and treatment” in A guid to treatments that work (1998))
Sadistic rapes and rape-murders, at least for adults, may be tied up with anti-social personality disorder and/or psychopathy, which is so far not treatable. And I would guess that it’s the same for people who rape and/or murder children, so DaveC is probably right that these people should, at the very least, be imprisoned for life without parole. But the study results mentioned above do suggest that rates of recidivism for more severe sexual offenders may not be that high, compared to other crimes, as KenB suggested.
On the one hand, I wouldn’t shed any tears if certain rapists, at least, were executed. But there are enough cases like that of David Milgaard, for example, that I don’t support the death penalty; if someone innocent is imprisoned for 20 years, that time can’t be given back – but it’s still less permanent than death.
GT,
You’re speaking of child molesters as if they had a disease (needing a “cure”). If that’s what they have, no retributive measures are in order. Quarantine for life, perhaps, but not punishment.
What would that entail? A comfortable, closely guarded government-run apartment complex in the wilderness, where they could live without as much punishment, but could never get near children?
It would be an odd approach, but I think it would be the only rational approach if it’s really true that these people differ from us by having some sort of horrible illness.
Although even if paedophilia turns out to be a disease, Duncan and some others like him should be in jail for life for murder.
in (my state) touching an under-aged (12 and under) girls clitoris is called “rape of a child”
so lets lock up or execute the rapists