Calgarian John Wrenshall has pleaded guilty in a US court to charges of conspiring to engage in sex tourism and possessing and making kiddie porn.
American authorities learned Wrenshall was operating a Thai brothel for peds when they seized the computers of a New Jersey man.
The sex tourism charges carry a minimum 15-year sentence on each count and the kiddie porn fetches 10-15 years. In other words Calgary won't be seeing this 63-year old for a good long time, if ever.
Wrenshall was convicted in 1997 of sexual assault against members of a Calgary boys choir. Newspaper articles from the time claim he'd been preying on young boys for three decades. He was convicted of molestation in 1970 and given a suspended sentence. For the 1997 convictions he received a year in jail plus two years of probation. His recent convictions should put an end to his 40-year career in paedophilia.
5 comments:
Castration is too good for men like this.
17 strikes and you're out.
I'm wrestling with this problem Anyong. Part of it is overcoming the inevitable emotional outrage. Yet I don't see that this child-love/rape thing is manageable within the criminal justice scheme.
The fundamental purpose of punishment - imprisonment - is deterrence of the convicted offender and others who might consider the same crime. Yet so often we see that imprisonment has no deterrent value in paedophilia.
It's as though this segment of society is itself incapable of existing within society without leaving another group - our children - at risk of their future and ongoing predations.
How are we going to balance these interests - the standard recognition we afford those who've "paid their debt to society" in prison against the risk of them again yielding to their compulsion to commit the most awful acts against the most vulnerable segment of our population, our children?
Perhaps 20 or 100 years from now we'll have some therapy or chemical that will resolve this conundrum but, for today, aren't we obliged to put the welfare of our vulnerable children ahead of the rights and interests of those who abuse them?
Maybe we need to establish remote settlements where paedophiles can live, in comfort and freedom, removed from all contact with our children. That might be just a brain fart but surely we need to find a solution better than the option that's failing us so often right now.
These creatures are incurable. Lock 'em in the deepest darkest hole and let 'em rot.
I'd like to think we're better than that, surreal. This is one of those few crimes that really gets under your skin, and that seems to extend to the general prison population also. Still our paramount duty is to protect our children, to keep their lives from being permanently ruined by paedophilia and if our traditional criminal justice system cannot do that, we need to find out why and then we need to explore alternatives which could possibly include some form of social exile.
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