Duke University faculty and students were shocked this week with the arrest of Frank Lombard, the school’s associate director of the Center for Health Policy, for allegedly offering his five-year-old son for sex with a man. Police say that Lombard identified himself as “perv dad for fun” and even suggested the hotel that the undercover officer could use for the crime.
Police say that Lombard told the undercover officer that he had molested the boy, who he adopted as an infant.
He could face 20 years in prison for trying to arrange for such a crime across state lines.
What is interesting is that this was not simply a police sting where the officer trolls sites used by perverts. This case was built on the testimony of an informant who said that he saw Lombard molest a child for hours on a live website called ICUii. The informant is reportedly facing his own charges for child porn or molestation. He said that Lombard molested an African-American boy. Lombard adopted two African-American boys.
should be
If the death penalty continues to be available, I can’t see it as a possible consequence for anything other than taking someone else’s life…
I was pro-death penalty for many years, and I still think that somewhere deep down inside, I’d like to take a turd that violates children and skin them alive. (that being the most horrible thing I could imagine) However, people lie, prosecutors lie, and defense attorneys sleep in court. While this is not the norm, at least I hope not, it’s enough for me to take the death penalty off the table.
In addition, when the ability to escape from prison was much more likely, the death penalty was the only way to be sure society was protected from those that would likely kill again. Today, that is not the case. We can let them rot in jail. (which, in some ways, may be a penalty worse than death)-Now if an inmate kills again in prison, I may be persuaded to seek the death penalty.
If the death penalty continues to be available, I can’t it as a possible consequence for anything other than taking someone else’s life, or for an action in which the intended consequence is death(s). If the death penalty was a possible consequence for kidnapping and molesting a child, there would be no motive for keeping the victim alive. I want to protect the victim as much as I want to punish the perpetrator.
Like 99% of what goes on in most of our lives; I don’t think this is a partisan issue. -Thankfully, I think we all want to protect society’s children from these scumbags.
FFLEO,
Oh yes, I realize where the bulk of the costs are incurred. I think the death penalty could be a viable punishment for some crimes if we could find a way to improve the timeliness of the appeals process (and hence lower the cost) while still maintaining adequate safeguards for justice and protecting human and civil rights. As a technical distinction, I have no issue with a higher threshold for the standard of proof for our theoretical “fitting punishments”, but I’d want no lower threshold than BRD for pedophiles. In fact, if this wasn’t a crime that so lent itself to DNA testing, I might be right with you on the standard of proof. I will also have to stipulate that as bad a loathe any idiot politician, there is nothing I revile worse than child molesters. Their evil echos and targets the innocent. It’s bad enough to be evil to adults, but to prey upon children? Isn’t that the textbook definition of a storybook monster? The Big Bad Wolf and the Gingerbread Witch made flesh. Am I biased? In this case, you bet I am.
Buddha,
The economics derives from the automatic and sometimes endless appeals in death penalty cases. I am not talking about beyond a reasonable doubt standard. The standard I am talking about is unequivocal, definitive, based on as absolute and irrefutable evidence as possible. Then there would be no appeal.
My best example was when Jack Ruby shot L. H. Oswald. That was a definitive murder and there was no doubt.
It’s an abhorrent crime. It’s one of those crimes so horrid that it was a large part of the reason I used to support the death penalty until I looked into the economics of the death penalty process vs. life long incarceration. I’m also not big on fear as a weapon or torture as should be self-evident by my postings, but honestly, if anything – ANYTHING – could scare a pedophile into permanent remission? I have an idea that’s totally unconstitutional and just plain mean but I think it just might work and provide utility to society as a whole. It concerns punishment once guilt is established beyond a reasonable doubt. The words alone would probably cause most pedophiles to take one for the team rather than run the risk of getting caught even once.
Scientific
Experimentation
Children don’t need to be coddled and protected from a lot of the stuff over protective parents seem to go in for these days. I’m of the Carlin mind that there’s nothing wrong with a little dangerous fun, but more importantly it’s a rough world and a lot of kids are ill served later in life by not learning how to deal with some of that roughness early. But all children should be protected from sexual abuse. ‘Nuff Said.
The person falls into my category of an unrehabilitatable criminal who deserves the death penalty. Some here seem to think that receiving abuse himself in prison is justifiable punishment, but I do not. Since I think there is neither heaven nor hell and that no apparitional anthropomorphic father or mother figure will punish this person from on high from a Great White Throne of Judgment/Justice on Judgment Day or at Armageddon, then his punishment must be in the here and now by the same human species he has wronged, harmed, and defiled.
I think that Mike Spindell is urging caution regarding unintended consequences and I agree. We do not need additional witch-hunt laws or entrapments, we already have the laws on the books to punish such abject criminals; however, I would want to go that extra step of issuing the death penalty for the most heinous of pedophiles, such as this person. If his guilt is firmly establish as unequivocal and irrefutable then he must be euthanized in the most humane manner possible without the suffering he has caused others.
There is no possible good whatsoever that this person could ever do for the good of society. The cost of housing him in prison could help numerous youngsters receive cancer treatments or any number of needed social services for the benefit of humankind.
“To Catch a Predator,” went away due to the issue of entrapment and poor ratings. Please don’t try to make this a left/right issue anyone, because it isn’t. People like this and those who would join NAMBLA should face full prosecution and very long jail sentences, perhaps life. However, whenever these issues that cut across party lines and offend human decency arise there are those who would use them for their own political gain. In recent months we have seen articles here on “child porn” arrests for 16 year old girls posing in undies for Internet pictures.
I’ve actually worked in Child Abuse and closely with the Brooklyn DA’s Sex Crimes Unit, in the 80’s. My feelings about child abuse and child sexual abuse are far to the right of Attila The Hun’s when it comes to punishment. However, as with any difficult issue the easy legislation ofttimes runs into the Law of Unintended Consequences and I would caution you to have suspicions about any pol, or person that makes this a crusade. Because 9 times out of ten it’s all about the publicity.
Jim Byrne:
it went away for the obvious reason that there are a lot of rat bast….ds in positions of power. Or there is a politically correct slant to it.
Mespo727272:
one tries.
Beulah writes: It is stories like this that cause me to question stopping rape in prison.
There should be a special hell for this piece of shit.
me: there is. it is the gen-pop in prison. prisoners hate child molesters. this guy won’t last a month
Assuming he’s guilty, hell is too nice a place for folks like Lombard.
One Republican Tool Kit for senor perv.
http://www.light-to-dark.com/repub_tool_kit.html
I too wish we could shutdown NAMBLA.
We already have some pretty good federal laws, with some pretty harsh penalties, and some pretty agressive LEOs going after these turds. However, everytime we create a new way to catch them, they counter with better methods to avoid being caught.
I am 100% convinced that an underground network exists to support this kind of activity. They even have their own words/acronyms, used to find this stuff on the internet.
Remember Dateline’s “To Catch a Predator”? That show received great ratings. It did a great job of exposing just how prevalent this perverse activity is. Why did it just go away?
IS:
Well, when you’re right, you’re right.
well maybe we should shut down NAMBLA and get harder with child porn laws.
This is one of those beyond-belief stories that test one’s capacity to believe …
http://blogdredd.blogspot.com/2009/04/do-we-confuse-capacity-with-morality.html
B-Man,
You know the problem here, this sick perv was probably getting adoption subsidies from the state to take care of this child.
The states are the only parties that can make “legalized bastards.”
A parent cannot disown a child as a child has to have a parents name on a birth certificate. But as soon as a parental right is lost, the child becomes a ward of the state and no parents. Or in some states cases, no way to support the child.
It is stories like this that cause me to question stopping rape in prison.
There should be a special hell for this piece of shit.
Where is Iranian Justice when you need it?
Since the prohibition against torture seems to be irrelevant and the recidivism rates for child molesters shows they generally won’t stop, this is the kind of crime that vivisection seems like the appropriate punishment for under the precedent established by the Bush Administration and protected by the Obama Administration.
If you’re going to go pig, go whole hog as they say on the farm.