Deserving of Privileges
Well isn't that reassuring? Those with mental illness are excused responsibility for the actions they take. Although those with mental illness who have not committed any real crimes can be incarcerated, can receive no attention and no ameliorating treatment and be left to rot with despair until they commit suicide, as the dreadful case of teen-age Ashley Smith demonstrated to our great shame as a society.
No one wanted to hear her pleas for help, a confused young woman with no one to speak out on her behalf. Shunted from one prison to another, her stay extended well beyond what the initial and pretty absurd stay was to have been for the crime of tossing crab apples at a postal worker, and for petty theft. Her mental illness was rewarded by long stays in isolation cells where black despair could overtake her.
Yet a man who travelled on a Greyhound bus and suddenly turned violent, killing and then cannibalizing an innocent young man who was a passenger on that bus, horrifying onlookers while he was locked within the bus with his dead victim, taunting the police, has been given all the professional psychiatric assistance deemed necessary.
And, because he was mentally unstable, he was not held responsible for the grisly murder of a man, and the subsequent assault on the corpse resulting in an hideous assault on the sensibilities of those who witnessed the horror. The psychiatrist who has been seeing to Vince Li's mental condition has lauded his great progress, assessing him now to be ready to deserve expanded privileges.
Ashley Smith is left to die, frightened and alone, her crime barely perceptible on the scale of public civility. Contrast that with Vince Li's abhorrent atrocity for which he is now entitled reduced supervision within the Selkirk, Manitoba facility where he is being held. How long before he is discharged?
No one wanted to hear her pleas for help, a confused young woman with no one to speak out on her behalf. Shunted from one prison to another, her stay extended well beyond what the initial and pretty absurd stay was to have been for the crime of tossing crab apples at a postal worker, and for petty theft. Her mental illness was rewarded by long stays in isolation cells where black despair could overtake her.
Yet a man who travelled on a Greyhound bus and suddenly turned violent, killing and then cannibalizing an innocent young man who was a passenger on that bus, horrifying onlookers while he was locked within the bus with his dead victim, taunting the police, has been given all the professional psychiatric assistance deemed necessary.
And, because he was mentally unstable, he was not held responsible for the grisly murder of a man, and the subsequent assault on the corpse resulting in an hideous assault on the sensibilities of those who witnessed the horror. The psychiatrist who has been seeing to Vince Li's mental condition has lauded his great progress, assessing him now to be ready to deserve expanded privileges.
Ashley Smith is left to die, frightened and alone, her crime barely perceptible on the scale of public civility. Contrast that with Vince Li's abhorrent atrocity for which he is now entitled reduced supervision within the Selkirk, Manitoba facility where he is being held. How long before he is discharged?
posted by Pieface | 7:27 PM
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