A Suicide Watch That Doesn’t Need Watching?
I’m a very stern advocate of suicide watches in jails and prisons; too often people die because of negligent guards and institution officials. But I admit that when I heard Austria’s Josef Fritzl was under suicide watch, I thought, “Well, it wouldn’t be the worst thing if he killed himself.” From the Guardian UK:
According to police, Fritzl held his daughter in the windowless, soundproof cellar beneath his house in the town of Amstetten, and raped her more than 3,000 times, fathering seven children with her. He is alleged to have drugged her in her bed when she was 18 and dragged her into the cellar which he had purpose-built over several years.
Three of the children stayed in the cellar with their mother, while the other three were taken upstairs to live with Fritzl and his wife Rosemarie, who was told that Elisabeth had run away to join a sect and, unable to cope with her children, had dumped them on the doorstep.
The crime came to light at the end of April this year when Elisabeth’s 19-year old daughter Kerstin became gravely ill, requiring hospital treatment. Elisabeth persuaded her father to take Kerstin to hospital where suspicious doctors called the police.
Following a nationwide appeal for Kerstin’s mother to come forward, Fritzl released Elisabeth from the cellar and she was able to tell police her story. The three children who had been held in the cellar were released on April 26, when they saw daylight and breathed fresh air for the first time in their lives.
Very uncharacteristic of me to support negligence on the part of the guards, but there’s a possibility he’ll only be convicted of incest, coercion and sexual abuse, in which case he wouldn’t spend more than six years in prison.
Six years for this guy, who shows an absence of remorse? He’s a danger.
Fritzl last month told a psychiatrist that he was “born to rape” and that his treatment of Elisabeth was a direct result of his experience of an abusive mother. He told her he had hatched the plan to incarcerate Elisabeth while he was serving a jail sentence for rape in the 1980s.
On the other hand, perhaps he will be convicted of a murder charge. See below.
liz | 12:11 PM | Uncategorized
“born to rape”- That alone is almost as horrific as the rest of the story.
this story reminds me somewhat of fred & rosemary west of gloucester, uk. (google them) he hung himself in his prison cell rather than serve time.
Leaving Fritzl out of it (he should be punished just to think it over why it was wrong to capture and rape his doughter) I am suprised to here about your concern about ’suicide watch’. Isn’t life something most valuable one has and in a way his/hers most precious belonging? So in a way a person in custody is deprived of her/his right to top her/himself.
And can a state punish her/him harder? I think not. “Suicide watching” is in a way punishing somebody in a way ‘oh, no, you won’t get away with it the easy way.’
But – I see it now – it goes the same with taking suicidal people into hospitals.
When John Geoghan was murdered in custody before trial by another inmate (which some believed the prison guards deliberately allowed to happen) many people cheered. That’s understandable but I disagreed. My position was that this denied Geoghan’s victims their due process and their right to see justice properly done. While one may think that he got what he deserved, I think he got off easily and would rather have seen the law prevail.
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