Occasionally, Justice Is Done

I remember this case from when it was first in the news, in June. Now, a grand jury has made the obvious official:

A Texas father who discovered a man raping his five-year-old daughter and beat him to death with his bare hands will not be charged with homicide under state law.

You really shouldn’t have to read any farther. This is not exactly a tough case. It makes sense to convene a grand jury, to make sure that the facts are as stated. But if they are, could there possibly be any question?

Lavaca County sheriff’s deputies said that the father, whose name has not been released to protect the little girl’s identity, sent her and her brother to feed the family’s chickens.

The boy rushed back to tell his dad that someone had grabbed his sister and taken her to a small secluded shack and the father rushed towards his daughter’s screams and arrived to find them both with their underwear off.

Q.E.D. Put yourself in the would-be rapist’s place. What do you think would happen if the father of a five-year-old girl caught you in the act? This is the building where the rape, or attempted rape, took place:

But there is a dark underside to this story. If you read the entire article, you find that the authorities placed weight on the fact that the father was remorseful, called 911, and went to considerable lengths to try to save the life of the would-be rapist. Now, those actions are not discreditable. From a religious perspective, it may be appropriate to try to save even the life of a rapist.

But that is entirely different from a criminal prosecution. This potential defendant attacked a man who was trying to rape his five-year-old daughter. Have we really become so insane that there is doubt about the father’s legal right to kill the miscreant in order to defend his daughter? In this particular case, the father used his bare hands–good for him–but that presumably was only because he didn’t have a weapon on his person. The idea that he needs to plead remorse in order to avoid a murder prosecution is ridiculous. And this incident occurred in Texas! God only knows what would happen to a man who saves his five-year-old from a depraved fiend in New York, or California.

I think it would be impossible to obtain a conviction of a father under these circumstances in any jurisdiction–thank God for the jury system–but the fact that our authorities, even in Texas, consider the question whether he should be charged with a crime to be a close one, suggests how low our culture has fallen. Liberals have mounted one attack after another on the right of self-defense, most recently via their effort to repeal “stand your ground” laws, an effort which appears plausible only to those who have no idea what those laws, which prevail in most states, actually say. Day by day, our culture of sanity and self-reliance is being eroded by the Left.

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