Trolls can now be sent to prison

[Alby_da_Wolf]

sapphi_snake said:

Alby_da_Wolf said:

[...]

Pleading guilty when you see the judge wants to make your case an exemplary one and if you can't afford a good lawyer can just be a desperate defence.

But I can't believe that you really consider less serious the offence committed by those that actually pushed a girl to commit suicide. And if you want to give young age as mitigating factor to those "normal" but vicious girls, how can you refuse mental illness as mitigating factor to the troll? And even being equal, and conceding mitigating factors both to bully girls and asperger troll, not prosecuting the girls at all is shameful.

I don't know what the girls who bullied her did exactly, so I can't really judge that. I don't know the nature of the bullying, and if it was the primary reason, or if it was just one of many factors that made that girl commit suicide. It's also irrelevant to the case at hand. The person on trial is this guy, for harassing the girl's parents and loved ones, along with the parents and loved ones of several other kids who commited suicide or were murdered.

Intent is also very important. It is generally considered that kids cannot be held accountable for some crimes, becaue they're often not aware of the consequences of what they're doing. This guy was obviously well aware of what he was doing, and he knew the effect it was having on the people he was harassing. Don't throw around the word 'mental illness', because Asperger syndrome is not the kind of 'mental illness' where a person suffering from it isn't aware of what he/she is doing (not to mention that many don't even consider it a legitimate condition).

 

Asperger syndrome can leave the subject able to learn and do even complicated concepts and tasks, but it affects the most social life and human communication skills, so even if he were not handicapped at all either in physical abilities or pure reasonment, he can really be almost totally handicapped in human relations, not understanding irony, not getting the external signals of other people's feelings and so on. You really can't say his particularly handicap didn't affect what he did. As I wrote in a previous post, he could have learned the mechanisms of black humour and sarcasm, but not understood in what cases is inappropriate. Or the reason of his actions could be another abnormal reaction, there are a lot of different possibilities that his mental problems influenced his behaviour. And even not considering mitigating factors, both in the case of the stabbed boy and the girl bullied until suicide, he wasn't the one that committed the biggest offence. Why didn't anybody  prosecute the bully girls? Was it easier to prosecute not the worst offenders, but just the one that couldn't afford expensive lawyers?