Tuesday, August 02, 2005
Nigglesworth!
Here's an exciting article.
This girl, Maribel Cuevas rocked this boy, Elijah Vang in the head. The police came and did that arrest thing, and now everyone's pissed at the police for treating a little girl badly.
Maribel says she was defending herself against Elijah and other boys who had thrown rocks and water balloons at her and some of her younger siblings while they were playing behind the low chain-link fence of a relative's front yard in their largely minority neighborhood.
As a disclaimer, I'll point out that I recall reading about this on Fark, but I make it a point not to quote Fark articles, because that's lame.
Still, the pro-arrest-the-kid folks seemed to focus a great deal on the lack of "proportional response." To me, that's fucking stupid. If you pick a fight with someone, you have no right to bitch if that person doesn't want to play by your rules when she beats the crap out of you.
That said, police are bound not by common sense, but by law. So when you have comments like this:
"Usually stories like this make headlines because there is something intuitively outrageous," said Michael Vitiello, a criminal law professor at McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento. "This is very uncommon given the ages of the children involved and all the other ways it could have been handled."
you have to ask the question: "What other ways?" And, of course, that question is not answered.
Followup: Here.
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