To my fellow believers: On the killing of child abusers

You’re right Glenn. I think that: “provocation should be admitted as a partial defence in homicide cases, but it’s only a partial defence.”. I think that the Government has over reacted to the Sophie Elliot murder by removing provocation. Weatherston’s provocation claim was not believed and had no bearing on his conviction and sentence.

“he is not a criminal – he is a father”

Andrei, I didn’t realise that these were mutually exclusive. And I honestly can’t see that you’ve interacted with what I have said in the least. It just looks like you’ve seen that you disagree, so gone in with a response. At least pause to chew and digest what’s written here. Which part(s) in particular do you take issue with?

(On a side issue – remorse isn’t a defence.)

Leaving the legalities aside for the moment, I think what people are aware of is the fact that finding one’s child being molested would induce absolutely blind rage in any father.
Now, that rage may not last for more than a few seconds or a minute, but it’s during that period that the “disproportionate” response takes place.
For anybody to claim that a person (justifiably) in that state ought to be able to carefully calibrate his response is simply absurd. Humans under acute stress do not act that way.

“..Nobody, not one single person, I guarantee it, sincerely, being ruthlessly honest with themselves, believes that to fly into an uncontrollable attack on this child abuser, would be an act in defence of your daughter.”
These are weasel-words.
I very much doubt the father himself would claim that the beating was in defence of his daughter, hence the remorse. If he believed it was necessary to defend his daughter, there would be no remorse.
No, the uncontrollable attack was the result of huge, overwhelming rage at what the man was doing. The rage lasted past the point where he had pulled the alleged perp off his daughter and of course that’s a matter of physiology–part of the human brain has flooded the muscles and other parts of the brain with chemical signals that don’t simply disappear in an instant.

Under the laws of Texas this man committed no crime – the matter was put to a Grand Jury who agreed no crime had been committed under Texan law.

Most people think justice has been served, including me.

Whatever we all face the final Judgement and if you are unhappy with this result you can console yourself with that thought

Glenn, you wrote: “..I suggested that maybe there’s a difference between stopping someone from molesting or sexually assaulting a child on the one hand, and then, having done so, attacking that person and beating them to death..”
You certainly suggest a period elapsed between pulling the man off his daughter and then “beating him to death”. You don’t know what that period of time was, but I’d surmise that the pulled the perp off his daughter while hitting him and continued to do so. Neither of us knows how many times he struck the man and it may have been just one blow of several or many which killed him.
“Beating to death” is emotive and quite possibly inaccurate.

Second, the act of defending his daughter isn’t a nicely defined and calibrated act or series of acts that can be switched off or terminated at will by an enraged man. He simply behaved like almost any father would under those circumstances, his actions can be seen as part of the act of defending his daughter given his physiological state and what was obviously a short, sharp encounter where events become confused and compressed.
I rather doubt you’ve ever found yourself in a highly stressful life-threatening situation.I have. Repeatedly. And I can tell you that 20/20 hindsight and pontification is very nice, but it has little to do with reality. Especially when it’s a reality that the person isn’t trained for and didn’t choose.

First of all, and before anything else, as Christians, we are not to condone sin. And, of course, murderis a sin. So, no, the man should not have done that. That said, as a father myself under the same circumstances, I can’t in good conscience say I wouldn’t have done the same. I would hope I wouldn’t, but in the emotion of the moment it would be almost impossible to control myself. So I am not unsympathetic to the man. And here’s the important part: neither am I unsympathetic to the rapist. I worked for five years in social services for kids. I know what sexual abuse does to them. One of the things it tends to do is turn them into sexual preditors themselves. I saw 7-year-olds that were already preditors. My best friend in College was abused as a kid. Consiquently, he had sexual urges he could barely control. After college, he ended up in prison for exercising his urges. I have heard him agonizing with the guilt and regret he feels, but the urges are still there, and will probably never go away. I said at the beginning that we are never to condone sin, but neither are we to condemn people. Many of my fellow social workers had a smoldering rage towards the men that sexually assaulted the children we were caring for. All I could ever think was “but for the grace of God…”. If we are Christians, we are sinners saved by grace. We had no capacityfor self-sanctification apart from the work of Christ.

“I did not say there was a wait between stopping one attack and beginning another.”
I didn’t say you did.
What I said was “you certainly suggest a period elapsed…”
“And the one thing you keep going back to is that the father was enraged.”
Because it’s crucially important. I don’t think you understand the dimensions of pure rage. Irritation at being served a lukewarm latte’ doesn’t constitute rage, real, killing rage. “reduced capacity” doesn’t even begin to cover it.
“Confrontational stance”? Get real. If the business of killing in defence of children or one’s loved ones doesn’t justify a very sharp disagreement with one who finds it distasteful, then you need to get out a bit more and stop playing with words.
My position (being the simple man that I am, and not a nuanced academic) is pretty straightforward, as I pointed out on my own blog.
I see you’ve just read it, but I’ll put it up here for others to see, since it’s part what I’m saying.
“I’m no longer a parent, Andrei but I know my first responsibility is to protect my wife (and my children if they were still around.)
I would kill. I would kill at the time, or a week or ten years later in revenge, but I would kill.
And be happy to answer for it in the hereafter.”
As for “respect” I show respect to those I believe deserve it.

Glenn – I have to disagree with you (rare though it is!). I’d have two points to make (and see how they float),

1) Would the father’s response not be justified based on his worst-case estimate of his daughter’s situation? As a former US Marine, when we went to Afghanistan we kept telling our guys that if they felt legitimately threatened, they were authorized to use force proportional to the threat they perceived. In this case, the father could have perceived a lethal threat against his daughter – how many child rape/murders have we read about in the news -and reasonably concluded that his child’s life was at risk – even after the first assault, as long as the perpetrator was mobile and near his daughter. In such a case, the three outcomes that I would accept of the altercation are the perpetrator being restrained, unconscious, or dead – not merely off of my daughter. What if he were armed, so after I separated them he attack me? I think that it is artificial to separate the situation of the perp being on the daughter to the perp being off – it’s a threat situation either way.

2) Going into a fight for your life (which, as a father walking on this situation, I would assume that I were entering) – you have to hit first, hit hardest, hit longest. It’s not over until the other guy is on the floor and not moving. If you are unwilling to do so, you risk losing the fight. And in a fight for my daughter’s safety, that’s not a risk I’m willing to take.

I think that maximal force was authorized, and if it resulted in the perp’s death than so be it. I’d have killed the guy seven days a week and twice on Sundays – but I recognize that it may not be Christ-like.

I’d like to note, however, that while I disagree with Glenn, I’d ask above posters to show more respect. While we may not agree, it’s a thought-stimulating discussion and Glenn is making excellent, rational points, trying to find what Christ has called us to do. This is highly admirable, so support him in it as a brother!

Conservative Christian? I don’t think so, spouting this stuff. Heck, you’ve got military men in this thread (counting me, John, Maybe KG, maybe even GunRights4US) who have probably shot better conservative Christians than you are.

Someone messes with your children, you don’t think twice about ending their life, Christian or otherwise. Self defence, revenge, you call it what you want. Taking away that right is about as far from “conservative Christian” as I can shoot. And that’s a long way.

The report indicates that the father was immediately remorseful over having beaten the perpetrator to the point of death (crying on the phone with the operator, apparently trying to preserve the perps life, etc.), which suggests to me that ‘retaliation’ was not his intent. I think ‘retaliatory’ comes off as a loaded word in the post. He wasn’t clearly beating the man to punish him for raping his daughter, or anything like that. He freaked out, understandably, and gave the man a thorough beating.

However, if I understand you correctly, Glenn, your concern is with the sort of bloodlust that is apparent in comments made about the incident. Of course that’s wrong, but that seems obvious. That this father’s actions were unjust seems correct in a mathematical sort of way (they were unjust in the sense of being unharmonious or disproportionate to the situation), but the actions do not also seem to be ‘retaliatory’ in any sense involving a clear intent. I think John is right to say that the way that you repeat the events of the story does involve an unnecessary ‘spin’ that is friendly to your more salient point, which is that comments after the fact along the lines of ‘good for you for killing that guy’ are morally repugnant.

I suppose New Zealand conservative is a bit different than American conservative, but I’m not sure. The American Conservative mixes (quite liberally, yuk yuk) their politics and religion, and these sorts of comments have quite a bit to do with a high value placed on personal autonomy which is confusedly believed to be a “Christian” value. I think the notion that “justice has been served” in this case are a sort of shorthand for “… by the man and not the state.”

At any rate, good post. Thanks for chiming in on this issue.

Now we have a man who was caught in the act standing before us. You’ve stopped him, and there he is, right in front of you. Pray tell, my fellow conservative Christians. What should happen now? The daughter should be seen to, yes of course, she would be seriously traumatised. That’s priority one. What else? Can you think of anything? As far as defending the girl from a sexual attack goes, it is done. Oh I know, how about we attack the person who did this and beat them senseless?

I think given the stress of the situation (in general terms), this chronology is unlikely. I don’t think it is realistic that one would take stock of the situation until well after the attacker has been rendered sensless.

I don’t think it unreasonable to render a physical attacker(for instance if the Father had to remove the attacker from the victim)incapacitated in the act of stopping the attack. If there is however, a separation of events as Glen suggests, and a retubution attack occurs, then this is another matter.

Jojo, we do not need omniscience in order to make use of the facts we have. Generalities about the limitless set of things that we don’t know are, in my view, uninformative. I have tried to explain why the facts that we do know, combined with good ethics, justifies what I have said.

Ciaron, in the first place, the minimal facts supplied by the unnamed “authorities” in this news story do suggest that the father interrupted and stopped the man, and then beat him. However, even if he stopped him in the act by pounding him the head repeatedly while he was abusing the girl (which seems unlikely), it doesn’t follow that beating him repeatedly in the head *is the same thing* as stopping the attack. There seems to me to be no sensible way to argue that this is the best or the necessary way to interrupt such an attack. But as I indicated in the blog entry, it’s not believable that the abuser would have just continued even when interrupted by the father. I doubt anyone really thinks that.

One further general comment – not just to Ciaron, but to readers in general. I have not claimed here that I would certainly have reacted better than the father. I have four children, three of them are girls. I know what it’s like to love them and I can only imagine what it would be like to discover someone hurting them like this. But the measure of a person’s wisdom and character cannot be limited to what they would do after long and careful weighing and reflection. That is not realistic. I think it is incumbent on all of us to consciously and continuously cultivate moral character so that we respond appropriately to circumstances in real life. If we have the kind of ethics that only produces good results as we sit at our desks and think about it, then we don’t have real ethics. Morality is what we live, not what we only think about. It means that – precisely because we know we wil be prone to react unreasonably in real life – we work on ourselves daily to foster praiseworthy instincts. To respond by stopping the attack and then beating and killing the offender reveals, in my view, that insufficient cultivation has been done. Even worse, to join the mob of those who defend and even encourage this sort of response and to shout down those who say otherwise shows that we have virtually no interest in doing this sort of cultivation. I want to see Christians fighting very hard against this sort of thing, and it’s unsettling to see the opposite occurring.

Hello everyone…..
My daughter was gang raped in 2000 by the Skaf gang.Now lets be clear on the facts…..there were 14 rapists , ages from 14 to 20.They raped her over a 6 1/2 hour period in three different locations and put a gun to her head at the end.When you consider the lousy sentencing they recieved I have no problem with the father killing this paedophile.What would the courts have given the rapist? Five years max? It’s time we did take the law into our own hands as the courts certainly don’t give a damn about victims but by goodness they will protect criminals.I learned that courts and judges can’t be trusted.If I had a chance I would kill my daughter’s lead rapist Bilal Skaf and I wouldn’t feel any guilt as the world would be a better place without him.
Victims receive the life sentence NEVER criminals.
D.T.

Glenn, you’re brave to post this.

You’re up against a difficult problem, however. Some people have alluded to the idea that this man due to simple biology was determined by forces outside of his control to do this (something that I think you respond to very well with the notion that we need to cultivate moral character ahead of time so that when horrendous circumstances arise we respond well – very eloquently stated!).

However, many of your commenters here are just as much a product of forces beyond their control. Someone has already admitted it, but only gently, brushing the issue away as “culture.” But that’s an incredibly powerful force. The moral landscape of your interlocutors has been ossified thus:

1) They are American.
2) They are conservative and the product of their conservative culture.
3) They are product of a certain variety of a Christian subculture.

These factors create a particularly strong hold on the mind. The people you are addressing didn’t choose these things, and they cannot break free from them without a concentrated period of hard intellectual work. I doubt this will happen for many of them (where is the motivation? As far as they are concerned, this is just the normal way to think). But one of the offshoots of the above three things is that concepts like liberty and justice get mashed together with another overriding theme: Violence. Not just force, but violence, and plenty of it.

Theirs is a culture that simply thinks of violence as part of the lifestyle of an honorable person, so it is literally unthinkable (I mean that literally: They are unable to think it) that a person who has been wronged could be doing wrong by responding with violent retaliation – no matter how violent, it seems.

I think your mission of persuasion is therefore doomed, but valiant nonetheless. Indeed – stand out from the crowd and say what is right because it is right, even though you know that your voice will be ignored.

I’m sorry Glenn, I have to disagree with you on several points and with several of the other commenters.

First of all Joel, it is not murder. It is obvious he didn’t intend to kill this man, and his reaction to save the creep shows that his intention was not retribution either. Murder requires intent. This father had no intention to kill this piece of scum. At worst, it’s manslaugter – accidently causing the death of another.

Ciaron has said what I would have said… “As far as defending the girl from a sexual attack goes, it is done.” Rubbish. It isn’t unreasonable to render a physical attacker incapacitated in the act of stopping the attack. Firstly, in the heat of the moment, you have no idea if the attacker would have kept trying to attack the girl, or if he’d have turned on the father or someone else. It is quite justified to incapacitate a violent attacker – especially one who has gone after a defenceless child.

And secondly, you don’t understand paedophiles. they don’t stop, they keep going after children. Obviously this father didn’t mean to do so much damage, but even in situations where someone did mean to permanently incapacitate, you need to look at why they did it. the person may have had someone close to them sexually assaulted repeatedly over a period of time, or they may very well have been a victim themself. They may genuinely see the only way of defending their child is to make sure the abuser can’t do it again.

That’s why they have trials for, and pleas of not guilty due to temporary insanity. Someone who has been repeatedly abused and no one could stop their abuser, they will genuinely see a permanent solution to an abuser as the only way to defend their child. They are mentally unwell in that case, not murderers. They need help not punishment.

Either way, in this case, I can’t agree with those who say this guy needs a medal, but he doesn’t deserve any punishment either. he didn’t mean to kill this guy, he WAS defending his daughter (even if some of you are too blind to see it), and he is the one who has to live with this guy’s death (not murder) on his conscious as well as the pain of living with what his daughter went through. He did not murder this man, but even killing someone accidently is a hard thing to live with.

This man deserves understanding not criticism and certainly not any legal punishment.

I’m sorry Glenn but I think you misunderstood what I was saying on a few points.

Maybe it’s different because you’re a man and I’m a woman, but if I see a guy sexually assaulting a young child, I am going to assume if I drag him off, he’s going to physically assault me, or even try to sexually assault me, and as such, I’m going to attempt to temporarily incapacitate him so he cannot. As a man, you might not fear for your safety, but other men may, and they will seek to temporarily incapacitate an attacker in genuine self defense.

That is what I meant by it’s rubbish to say “it is done” – because all too often it’s not done to simply drag someone off a child they are sexually assaulting. Sometimes you need to defend yourself or the child or others further.

And I never spoke about vengeance. I spoke about DEFENDING other children from future attacks. It has nothing to seeking to avenge yourself, or even avenging others. It is the perception that if you do nothing, then someone else is imminently in danger. It is neither personal, vengeful or angry, nor is it seeking to “punish” the abuser. It is an overwhelming need to protect a defenceless vulnerable person from abuse. It is about protection and defence. While the thinking may be false logic by the person thinking it, it definitely has nothing to do with vengeance.

What I’m saying is that a person who thinks like that is mentally unwell not immoral. There is a huge difference.

As someone who does not believe a Christian is ever justified by joining the military, defending someone else (not oneself) is justifiable but never glorifiable.

It should shock us that none of us deserve life and yet, God even loves and seeks to redeem the child rapist.

What this father did can be understandable, but we should never cheer and think he did the right thing. He did the only thing that came to his mind. As a Christian, I mourn for the evil man (more so for the victim,but I mourn still) that it came to that.

Yet our faith and ethics on violence only make sense if Christ was crucified and rose from the dead. Violence makes this world turn on its axle, only the love of God our savior brings us out of that. We still live in a dark world but we should seek to point away from this evil age. This includes violence, though with what is told of this man (he tried to revive him, emotional wreck) we should embrace him.

What he did was not the right thing, it was the only thing. We mourn it ever came to this. The greatest blight that can fall on such an act is to forgive the man.

Christianity is offensive and bizarre by common perception.

Mike not all Christians believe Calvinism is 100% right just as Cal, not all Christians believe that joining the military is wrong.

In fact, one of the best pastors I have ever had was in the army many years, first as a soldier, and then as a chaplain. And no it was not some weird denomination. It was a normal average bible-believing Australian Baptist church (as opposed to the American Baptists who tend to be quite a bit different).

“Calvinism” isn’t a single belief. It has many, many components. I simple don’t believe in predestination – God knows before the world was created what our choices will be, but He still gives us the choice to choose to follow Him or reject Him.

Julie has already made all the points I was going to make. As a lawyer, I’ve worked on cases involving self defense and defense of others. In one, the security video shows an initial unprovoked attack followed by the victim putting the aggressor on the ground and hammering nearly 10 punches into the side of the aggressor’s face in under 3 seconds. Totally justified. The law of self defense in most common law countries — except England — is that a victim is permitted a proportionate and reasonable response to the threat to their bodily integrity or that of another. Someone commits a battery by grabbing you on the shoulder, you may reasonably respond by employing a countergrab, wristlock, or simply brushing the hand away. Someone acts in a way that would place a reasonable person in the victim’s shoes in fear of imminent death or bodily injury of themselves or another, the victim is entitled to use whatever force is necessary to stop the attacker and it does not matter if the aggressor dies as a result of being stopped.

On the facts of the article, Glenn is wrong. There was an attack on another — in many jurisdictions, rape is deemed on par with deadly threats. The father (also in many jurisdictions an attack on a child is deemed an attack on the parent, which expands the right to respond even more) stopped the rape and beat the attacker to death. He is justified in doing so as long as the threat was not neutralized. In the case I started this response with, the victim punched until the aggressor stopped trying to get up and then ceased and backed away. The aggressor suffered multiple fractures of the jaw and occipital bones, but it was still ruled self defense because the line between “threat ongoing” and “threat neutralized” is not clear. The victim in strong self defense jurisdictions has a lot of leeway in what constitutes a reasonable judgment of the amount of responding force necessary to neutralize the threat. In the Texas rape case at hand, the father legally had extraordinary latitude in responding to and neutralizing the threat to himself and his daughter. It’s not about provocation, it’s about the severity of the threat and the reasonableness of the father in understanding proportionate response and when the threat was neutralized. On these facts, I lean heavily toward the grand jury’s conclusion.

All of this, however, is different than the question that Glenn posed. Under Glenn’s hypothetical, the father saw the rape, stopped the attacker, and then beat him to death. I believe this does not conform to the facts of this particular case, but the question Glenn raises is nonetheless important. As Julie correctly points out, paedophiles and rapists don’t just stop at one. The question Glenn posed is whether Christians may properly support the father stepping in and assuming the state’s monopoly on violence in response to criminal actions.

@Mike – God’s love and judgment/wrath are not necessarily incompatible. By analogy, it is entirely possible that the rapist’s mother loves him but nonetheless condemns his actions.

Mike I think it depends on your definition of humanity’s “choice” vs God’s will. I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive. Like if I say to my daughter “are we going to catch the bus or walk to the shops”. Regardless of what method she chooses to get there, we are still going to the shops.

On a lot grander scale, in a lot more complicated way, that’s how I see God’s will and human choice interacting. God’s will IS what will happen regardless, but He allows us choices in how it’s done. We are not robots. Just because God’s guides us and everything is His will, doesn’t negate mankind’s choices. Free will and God’s will aren’t discrete variables. They interact in ways that no human can fully comprehend – all we can do is try which is why there are so many different beliefs amongst Christians on the topic.

Glenn if you’re correct and if what you believed happened actually happened the way you are suggesting it has happened then I would have to agree with you all the way. The problem that I’m having is that in the absence of all the facts, I’m very uncomfortable with saying that this father should be charged with anything. As I said in my earlier post, with what very few facts we do have available to us, it does appear as if this father may have acted as judge, jury and executioner of his daughters attacker but for us to call for action against this father when we ourselves don’t have all the facts, in my view, would place us in danger of acting as his judge, jury and executioner.

You pointed out that you don’t think anyone sincerely believes that the child abuser, once interrupted and stopped, would have again tried to rape a girl right there in front of the father. I certainly agree with this but would you agree that after stopping the attack the father also had the right to further insure their safety by doing what he was necessary to neutralize the suspect? I’m not saying he should have killed him but neutralized him, do you agree? If you agree that the father had the right to insure their safety, how many hits would you say would be justified before it went from defending, protecting and insuring their safety to “Repeatedly pummeling the man in the head”? How many hits did this father give? The thing is we don’t know if he beat him until he was exhausted and just couldn’t strike anymore or if he hit him four, five, or six times. We don’t know if the father was outmatched and felt he had to hit until this guy was incapable of bringing further harm to humor his daughter. From what I understand it was just the father, the attacker and the child until other help (witnesses) finally showed up.

Whereas I can agree that the child abuser, once interrupted and stopped, would “NOT” have again tried to rape the girl right there in front of the father, I cannot say with any level of certainty that the child abuser would not have done whatever he could have possibly done to avoid prison. I doubt after the attack was stopped, this man would have just quietly submitted to a citizens arrest and waited for the Texas Rangers. I would never underestimate ones desire to stay out of prison or what they might be capable of, especially when they’re only three hrs. away from the freedom of the Mexican border. I’m pretty sure this rapist wasn’t looking forward to be a convicted child rapist in a Texas prison. I don’t know if all this was going through the fathers head. I don’t know if the father continued to hit him an “unknown” amount of times because he was concerned for safety of him and his daughter. For all I know you could be right. Maybe this is a case of stopping, defending and avenging. If so, I would agree with you 100% but the thing that makes this difficult for me is that I just don’t know the full story.

I’d debate your references to Tertullian and Origen.

Tertullian most of all, a man who hated Rome and thought soldiers, along with gladiators, false gods and emperors would burn forever. I only think of a quote by him, “When Christ disarmed Peter, he unbelted every soldier”. I’m not sure your sources.

I know Origen, in his response to Celsus that Christians were lackluster, traitorous and unpatriotic, stated that Christians were doing the Empire better service by prayer than the legions on the frontiers. He didn’t say “No, we do serve in the military”, that was what Celsus hammered the Christians for. Not serving when barbarians threatened every corner of the empire.

A lot of early Christians made parallels to use the metaphor of being a soldier for Christ. I don’t know if who your reading is skewing the quotes this way. There were Christians in the army, that is for certain, but very few (first being in the 4th century) took pride in such service. Many tried to leave as soon as possible. The irony of Martin being a saint for the military is that he threw down his military honors, asking instead to leave. There are other stories of Christians throwing their belts at their commander saying they are servants of Christ.

Regardless if true, Maximilian of Tebessa illustrates this story well. He is told to enlist as his father is a soldier (sons were compelled to enlist in order to maintain a certain legion service honor of land), he says he will not and can not. If he does not, he will be put to death (his failure to fulfill his father’s duty was equivalent to abandoning the army). He is asked why, he says he is a Christian. He is told other Christians serve, his reply is fascinating. He says he knows and they know best for themselves, but he can not do wrong.

Now that could mean that it was a matter of conscience or they were in error. There are plenty of early Christian voices who refused to receive soldiers and Christians who went off to serve in the legions were not welcomed back. I don’t think that’s necessarily right, but that’s the extent some despised the military. Condemnation of the military came from voices that also praised the empire (Lactantius). They accepted civil service was fine, but military was not open.

Eventually by Constantine, there were voices calling for the army (like Augustine) even though most qualified that a Christian could not fight and kill a Christian. Then once the door was opened, combined with the Constantinian fusion of sword and cross, it inevitably changed.

However, I’m of the view that the lure of power and the weariness caused by continual persecution (not necessarily killing, but constant stress) created a new theology of making the state sacred. Such thinking was predicted in Revelation and an abomination.

Anyway, sorry for the long derail, but I thought it important on talking about Christians, violence and its glorification/justification.

Glenn, I love love love this post! I do agree with you, but quite apart from that, you’re calling us to criticize our instincts and strive for the highest, best way. That is always right.

@ Matthew Flannagan:

You’ve said “the attempted rape had been stopped and yet after that the pounding continued. Obviously if it had been stopped it was not necessary for defense.”

Not necessary for defense? Does this not assume too much to suggest that just because the rape was stopped that the father should have believed that he and his child were free and clear from all danger? The child rapist already demonstrated what he was capable of when it came to satisfying his sick urges. Is it not unfair to assume that the father had no reason to believe that after the attack was stopped, the attacker would not have acted just as horrifically if it meant securing his freedom? We know a child was raped. We know the father stopped the rape. We know that the father continued to strike the attacker after the attack was stopped. We know he tried to get the attacker medical attention, even to the point of trying to take him to the hospital himself. What we don’t know is why the father continued to strike him or even how many times he struck him. Here we could only guess.

… of the doubt.

Tim, but “until it is clear that he has stopped moving” is not permissible. Where do people get the idea that stopping a threat means having permission (in a moral sense) to pummel a person until they are inanimate?

Tim:

“and by “clearly neutralized,” I mean that either he recognized, or any reasonable person placed in that crisis situation should have realized, that neither he nor his daughter was in any immediate danger — deliberately decided to beat the perpetrator to death, then what he did was wrong.”

Not far enough, Tim. If he had neutralized the threat – stopped the attack, then what gives him the right to beat the abuser *at all,* let alone to death? Surely attacking him at all after thinking that he had stopped the attack is the issue here. Glenn never claimed that he deliberately killed the guy, so be careful not to misrepresent him.

Kevin,

You ask:

If he had neutralized the threat – stopped the attack, then what gives him the right to beat the abuser *at all,* let alone to death?

Again, it is a matter of the facts in the case. If the time span between the father’s first laying a hand on the perpetrator and the final blow were, say, two minutes, we would reasonably wonder whether hitting him that long was necessary, and the phrase “beat the abuser … to death” might be warranted.

However, if the whole thing were over in under ten seconds, then it is much more plausible that there was not time for the father (assuming that he was not highly trained in martial arts, with preternatural self-possession in combat) to draw what I have called the fine line between neutralizing the threat and knocking the guy senseless.

You continue:

Surely attacking him at all after thinking that he had stopped the attack is the issue here. Glenn never claimed that he deliberately killed the guy, so be careful not to misrepresent him.

If you will read my post again, you will see that I have not done so. The difficult area, morally, lies in the variation on the first scenario, as I described it. Did the father continue to hit the man “after thinking that he had stopped the attack,” where the attack consists in physical danger to either him or his daughter? Did he continue to hit him after he should have thought that he had stopped the attack?

Glenn, you write:

“until it is clear that he has stopped moving” is not permissible. Where do people get the idea that stopping a threat means having permission (in a moral sense) to pummel a person until they are inanimate?

For most of us, in a brief scuffle, determining that the other person is no longer a threat is not a simple business. The key to the moral question here is not, as you seem to be suggesting, whether the perpetrator was in fact no longer a threat: it is the epistemic question of whether the father should have known that he was no longer a threat. I submit that if the fight was brief, then it will be difficult to make the charge stick that he should have, multiple blows to the head notwithstanding.

Still, if he went on beyond the point where he should have known that the man was no longer a threat, then, as I said, it is a wrong; but it is largely extenuated by the circumstances.

Dan is an expert in the legal reasoning on cases like this (and thank you, Dan, for your long and thoughtful post), and I think that the legal analysis he gave represents sound reasoning on the questions of defense of another, the level of threat constituted by rape in progress, and other such issues.

@ Matthew Flannagan:

No confusion, simply a third option:

an (c) act being justified as necessary to defend one’s self or child from physical assault.

The media here in Australia repeatedly has stories of men stepping in to stop a woman being raped, and then being killed (bashed, stabbed, shot) once they pulled the perp off the woman. Not all perps want to run away – some will turn on the good samaritan coming to the rescue. Some are just violent thugs, some are hyped up on drugs, some just want to make a clean get away and dispose of any witnesses before running.

It’s something you can never be sure of. Especially if the perp, the father and the child were the only witnesses. Nowhere does it say the perp tried to run.

And also, nowhere have I read the definition of “beaten to death”. There is a big campaign here in Australia called “one punch can kill”. Because it can. There are frequently news stories that use the term “beaten to death” to describe incidents when the attacker punched their victim ONCE. Just the one punch either triggered a pre-existing medical condition, or the victim hit their head on the ground, or similar.

How many times did this father hit the rapist and over what time frame? “Beaten to death” could mean anything from a single punch to a savage beat down over a long period of time with many blows.

It sounds to me, in everything I’ve ready so far, the father punched this guy only a few times, and the guy died. The media will hype such a situation as “beaten to death” but that’s all it would be – hype.

Until we’ve sat on that grand jury, listened to the evidence, or otherwise been involved in the case and seen the evidence for ourselves, we cannot know.

Julie – according to the news story, authorities claimed that the man punched the abuser in the head “repeatedly.” That couldn’t mean once, and doesn’t suggest twice. I don’t think it’s hype to say that this was a beating to death. But that’s just the way it looks to me. Given that there’s not going to be a trial, this man will never have to make his case for what he did, nor will it ever be made known precisely what he did (unless he chooses to make it known).

Glenn,

As a Texan, I can with the utmost assurance state that your Texas accent is spot on. I pick up a bit of East Texas/SE Gulf Coast in the pronunciation.

Good post, btw.

Tim: There are a number of points that I have repeated here. However, probably the point that I have repeated more than any other – to the point where I worried that my repetition would become annoying, specifically to ward off misunderstandings, is that while I think this man’s actions were morally wrong, there are mitigating circumstances that mean he was not a murderer. I’ve repeated my reference to the partial defence of provocation, and I’ve repeatedly harped on about my acceptance of the claim that he had diminished capacity to respond in a rational manner. With all due respect – but with the desire to stress how much of the problem is that people genuinely aren’t listening to what I say, this means that I have answered your question 2) at least four times explicitly now and won’t do so again. It bothers me that people are still even asking this (and I’m sorry that you got the brunt of that complaint, it’s the straw that broke the camel’s back).

As for question 1), I think it’s almost like cheating to add the word “reasonably.”

(1) If the father could not reasonably have known that the perp was no longer a threat until he had hit him hard enough to kill him, would you agree that, so far as the killing of the man is concerned, he is morally in the clear?

Here’s why I say that: I think it’s a fair test – not just a legal test, but in terms of general moral culpability – to ask not just whether or not a person themselves acts like X is true, but whether or not a reasonable person would believe that X is true. Now, what would you think if someone said: “Don’t you agree that if the 9/11 hijackers reasonably thought that crashing the airliners into the World Trade Centre would avert the wrath of God on humanity, they would be morally in the clear?” The problem of course is that a question like this just asks the other person to accept that the belief in question could have been reasonable. So my response is this: I do not accept that it is reasonable to believe that repeatedly pounding a person in the head until they’ve stopped moving is required in order to stop a rape on a girl and to pre-emptively ensure that the abuser will not turn on and attack you. I reject the reasonableness of that belief-action combo, and I especially (and here is the point) reject the claim that this belief-action combination is the morally best one to hold and enact under the circumstances.

I think a crucial distinction to draw here is this: I agree that it is reasonable for us to think that the killer would have assumed the worst and reacted in the worst way. That is what’s reasonable in this equation. But that doesn’t mean that he acted on beliefs or thoughts that were themselves reasonable. Indeed I would say that acknowledging his reduced capacity under the circumstances – as we all do – means that we should be more cautious about assuming that he was acting on reasonable beliefs.

Remember: Bad-tolerable-better-best. I’m trying to get people to desire the best in themselves and to call for the best in others, not to simply admit what is understandable on the part of others.

… very difficult to do.

I have really appreciated some of these comments, but I’m going to bow out now. People are welcome to continue the discussion. I’ll just leave this as my thought for the day:

I’m no pacifist. Not by a long stretch. But I have recently gained a new appreciation for the frustration they must feel at people’s natural instincts about the righteousness of violence.

Tim, that’s very, very bad form. Shame. Glenn was clear in explaining why he believed any reasonable person should think that the attack on the girl was over. He explained that he thinks the burden of proof rests with those who endorse the killing to argue that a reasonable person should suppose that this level of violence was necessary. And now, after Glenn very gracefully bows out, you goad him by sneakily implying that he has not defended his position. That’s low. Glenn has been incredibly patient with this sort of thing, much moreso than a lesser person might have been.

Kudos for your handling of the responses, Glenn.

Cal – I don’t think it’s a dirty word, for what it’s worth. I have only said that I think pacifism is a mistaken view. I regard many views as respectable and understandable, but mistaken. I will likely comment on pacifism specifically in future.

And to all – I’ve had a change of heart since my last comment, and I have decided to close the comments. (Sandra, for what it’s worth, I don’t really think your comment to Tim was necessary, and I’m trying to stem the tide of that sort of thing given that I won’t be following the conversation. I think those who have spoken have had their say now – and I have given them the last say to be as fair as possible in closing comments.)