• Twitter
  • Facebook
News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

The

A little bit of irony here:

A Cloverdale man convicted in 1995 in Tippecanoe County for killing a 10-year-old boy is expected to be sentenced in November to life in prison without parole.

In exchange, the boy's parents agreed to stop seeking the death penalty during a scheduled retrial, after a federal appeals court overturned the original death sentence.

During an informal meeting in Tippecanoe Superior Court 2 Tuesday night, Christopher M. Stevens, 37, agreed to a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole in the 1993 death of Zachary Snider, 10, of Putnam County.

[. . .]

The landmark case led to the creation of Zachary's Law in Indiana, requiring sex offenders to register with local police when they move into a new neighborhood.

The man whose atrocity resulted in all sex offenders having to register is himself serving the sentence many on the registry should be serving: life with no possibility of parole. The reason offenders have to register is that they are still considered dangerous. Some are and some aren't. The dangerous ones should just be locked up (or never let out in the first place). The ones who aren't (those charged with statutory rape, for example, when they were just a few years older than their too-young girlfriends) should be free to go on with their lives. By treating all offenders the same and continuing to punish them after they've served their sentences, the law is heading in a direction we might all come to regret.

Quantcast