A defendant who was captured in courtroom video leaping over a judge’s bench and attacking her, touching off a bloody brawl, is scheduled to appear before her again Monday morning.
In his Jan. 3 appearance before Clark County District Court Judge Mary Kay Holthus, Deobra Redden, who was facing prison time for a felony battery charge stemming from a baseball bat attack last year, tried to convince the judge that he was turning around his violent past.
Redden asked for leniency while describing himself as “a person who never stops trying to do the right thing no matter how hard it is.”
But when it became clear Holthus was going to sentence him to prison time, and as the court marshal moved to handcuff and take him into custody, Redden yelled expletives and charged forward. People in the courtroom audience, including his foster mother, began to scream.
You didn’t say change. You said turn their life around. Don’t change your words now, bud. To which I said, no not everyone can turn their life around. Some people are only capable of getting worse.
And sure that’s the point of the criminal justice system, ideally.
The point of jail/prison itself is to keep offenders segregated from society while that happens, with security levels matching the severity and risk of the offender. For those that cannot be reformed or have committed unforgivable crimes, the point is to permanently segregate them from society to prevent them from further harming it.
To turn someone’s life around is to change for the better. I also quoted you with that phrase.
If you’re going to argue semantics, invest in a thesaurus. Also, if youre going to play the pedantic card, don’t use colloquialisms.
I’d suggest you do some reading on the histories of criminal punishments and how society has evolved around them.