In case you haven't been following the news, or have been so traumatised by Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" that you've switched to the Weather Channel for a while, a serious miscarriage of justice recently occurred in Florida. In fact, that's too mild a phrase. What happened in Florida was a horrible tragedy that could easily have been avoided.
An 11-year-old girl named Carlie Brucia was kidnapped and murdered, apparently by a man who should never have been seen outside of a jail until she was in her thirties. Her real killer, however, was the justice system that somehow let her murderer walk free after repeated arrests and convictions.
37-year-old Joseph Smith appears to be the man seen in a surveillance video, wearing a mechanic's shirt with a name patch on it, showing tatoos on his arms that match Smith's. He's definitely the man who escaped justice so many times that it seems as though it must be a typo or mistake, as reported by AP News.
Smith has been arrested at least 13 times in Florida since 1993.
He served 17 months in prison in 2001 and 2002 for heroin possession and prescription drug fraud. Eight days after he got out, he was arrested for cocaine possession and placed on probation for three years. He also got probation for aggravated battery in 1993 and heroin charges in 1999.
A state correction official, Joe Papy, said that a probation officer had asked a judge on Dec. 30 to declare Smith in violation of his probation because he had not paid all his fines and court costs.
Papy said Circuit Judge Harry Rapkin declined to find Smith in violation, which could have returned him to jail. The judge defended his decision Friday, saying the probation officer never sent him the evidence he requested that Smith had willfully refused to pay.
Because the justice system was excessively tolerant of this animal, an 11-year-old girl is dead. How many more like him are walking the streets because we lack a consistent, national "three strikes" law such as California and 25 other states have, and because the ones we do have aren't being enforced? (The Federal three strikes law requires that the third offense, at least, be a Federal crime.) In 2002, the Mercury News "reviewed the case histories of all 181 individuals in Santa Clara County whose third strike was non-violent and found that 173 had been convicted of multiple violent acts, many predating the three-strikes law. Their rap sheets contain scores of robberies, rapes, sexual molestations, serial burglaries, assaults and other hard-core criminal behavior." Under this law, a convicted third-time criminal recieves 25 years to life, period. The California version doesn't mandate that the third offense be a violent crime, unlike the others; even non-violent crimes like burglary can qualify one for incarceration. And according to California officials, the law works, though the Supreme Court has been kept busy upholding it against challenges and no two states have the same three strikes law. Florida instituted a three strikes law of its own in 1999. It is unclear to me why it wasn't used to put Joseph Smith where he belonged: serving his 25-to-life sentence instead of (allegedly, true) killing an innocent child. After the arrest for cocaine posession eight days after his last release from prison, his third (possibly fourth) drug charge in just three years, why was he given only probation?
Amber alerts, television coverage, and flyers passed out by neighbors and volunteers is no defense against the kind of evil that murders little girls. Our justice system is supposed to do that. But when the system lets repeat offenders roam the streets at will, despite laws enacted to prevent that from happening, what kind of protection does it really provide?
