MA- FROM THE EDITOR: More than revenge, less than pity

4-5-2009 Massachusetts:

The statue of Justice holds a balance in her hand and wears a blindfold. She is the ideal of fairness, intellect and the equality of all before the law.

Justice on Thursday put a sick young man away, probably for the rest of his life, for his rape of a 6-year-old child in New Bedford's public library. Corey Deen Saunders will find but small protection from the hostile inmates inside the state's corrections system. He will be subject to terrible things there, things none of us likes to think about. He's a "skinner," prison slang for child molesters who are treated as the lowest form of life inside the state's barred warehouses.

But Saunders is a monster, and we can do nothing else but lock him up. Judge Robert Kane was right in determining that Saunders is a sociopath who long ago began using the various treatment options for sex offenders to find his next victims. If he ever gets out, he will do what he does again and again and again. I hope and believe he will never get that chance, and when he comes up for parole in 15 years, that he will be returned to his cell.

If he lives that long, that is.

I have seen what inmates do to child molesters in prison. I wish I believed that our science could find the key within the genetic or psychological code of people like Corey Saunders that could free them from the evil impulses that make them too dangerous for our company. And I wish there were something else for us to do with him, perhaps a place for these troubled and dangerous people on an island in an ocean strait where the currents run fast and cold and the sharks circle so none can escape. But this is America, and we don't do Devil's Island, unless of course you count the detention center at Guantanamo Bay.

But I wonder what Justice will say about the Bernie Madoffs of the world, who stole billions, ruined countless lives and did terrible harm to many educational and charitable institutions, including Brandeis University, that trusted the former NASDAQ chairman with their money.

What will Justice say we should do with him and the other white-collar crooks who helped bring down a nation's economy and destroyed people's hopes to go to college, buy a home, work hard and someday retire, instead leaving our children and our children's children with a lifetime of debt?

Is it enough to seize their financial assets, make them repay a portion of the money they stole and put them into a cozy Club Fed for white-collar federal inmates?

Does it deter others from stealing the rest of us blind? Does it in any way compensate for the losses of millions of victims?

We know what to do with the gunman who murders a convenience store clerk. In Massachusetts he gets a life sentence; in states that have capital punishment, especially in the South, he finds himself 15 years later strapped to a gurney with plastic tubes feeding a killing poison into his veins.

Is that justice? Certainly under the eye-for-an-eye code of the ancient Mesopotamian ruler Hammurabi it is. Punishment equal to the harm resulting from the crime is a central element in our nation's laws and statutes.

But where will Justice come down on the likes of Madoff and the others like him? The angry part of me wants to agree with Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who suggested that the bonus babies at AIG commit suicide like some disgraced Japanese executives do when trying to restore their honor. And no doubt a good old-fashioned public lynching on Wall Street would give any potential crook in a suit second thoughts.

But this is America, and we don't do that here, either. Justice must be more than revenge, and it must be less than pity.

I will think about the little boy who was raped in a public library, and hope and pray that the trauma he suffered at the hands of Corey Saunders eventually recedes so that he can live a full and contented life. And I will think about Corey Saunders and the hell that awaits him in prison. He is, however, where he must be for the rest of us to be safe, and in the end, that is what Justice must ultimately assure.

I just wish that Justice had a better answer for a sick and dangerous young man who was the victim of a childhood that turned him into a monster living in the most sordid corner of a world that none of us wants to know. ..Editorial.. by Bob Unger of The Standard-Times