Mob-rule vigilante-ism is a crisis of conscience for Phila authorities

Stu Bykosky wrote a tasty little piece for the his Daily News column today where he compared the vigilante justice of beating a rape suspect to picking a scab on your knee as a child. While I understand the icky metaphor he paints, some kind of a slippery slope of opportunity for infection - there is something more icky going on here that I want to comment on:

The city will not be charging any of the people who apprehended and beat the suspect with any crime.

News flash: Assault is assault, and someone who wields a 2x4, striking someone else on the street, should be arrested. Bottom line, because it's assault and that's the law.

Now, I realize I'm skipping some background here. This rape was a truly heinous attack on a little girl, only 11, who was grabbed on her way to school, held and brutalized repeatedly to such an extent that she had to undergo surgery. Very few people will ever understand what that baby had to endure and what she will go through for the rest of her life. Surgical wounds heal, and even if she can have children when she gets older, the emotional scars she will have to live with can never be understated.

I watched the father of that little girl on local television news Tuesday evening when he said that he wanted to be the first one to find Carrasquillo, telling the reporter that if he did, "God knows best" what he would have done. And I instantly shared the same sentiment. If that were my baby, held captive and brutalized on her way to school, I'm not sure what I would do should I be encountered with that attacker alone.

But that said, I would expect to stand for what I had done. If I took the life from that rapist, like he took the innocence from my baby girl, I wouldn't expect the justice system to turn a blind eye to what I had done. And neither should the troupe in Kensington.

While I am happy that the suspect was apprehended, while I am happy that the neighborhood came together to do something for the safety of their streets, and while I don't feel sorry for him at all for the beating that he took, the people who assaulted this man should be charged with assault. Period. Because that's what they did. If restraint should be shown to those citizens who stepped up, then it should be done by a judge. I'm no lawyer or professor. I'm not the mayor or the chief of police, but it's government 101. The police enforce the law while the judiciary interprets the law and evaluates the circumstances surrounding incidents to assess guilt, culpability, whatever you want to call it. I'm not saying anyone should go to jail, but at minimum each person should have to stand before a judge for the role that they played in this attack. That's how that one goes. That's how it's supposed to go anyway.

If the city does nothing here by electing not to charge a single person for the crime that was committed, recorded on video, bragged and accoladed over, then they set a dangerous precedent in a city already plagued by violent crime and disrepect for the rule of law.

You reap what you sow.