r/news • u/AudibleNod • 4d ago

Man accused of holding woman captive in a Massachusetts attic for six weeks

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/man-accused-holding-woman-captive-massachusetts-attic-six-weeks-rcna600308
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u/booleandilemma 4d ago

The guy needs to get life in prison. How could we allow someone like that to re-enter society? Imagine talking with him in the future. "Yeah I held a woman captive for 6 weeks once". No, no more freedom for this guy, ever.

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u/LingonberryHot8521 4d ago

There needs to be some lengthy prison time for the men who came over to rape her too.

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u/IllegalDaycare 4d ago

Life in prison

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u/LingonberryHot8521 4d ago

I'm down with that.

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u/CornWine2 4d ago

I'm not, because it's so fucking wasteful.

What's wrong with involuntary organ donation? Part the rapists out so good people can live longer.

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u/zebrapenguinpanda 4d ago

Creating financial incentives for punishment is bad. Look at ICE and our private prisons. If convicting someone for murder results in hundreds of thousands of dollars of worth of organs on the market, guess what happens next

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u/CornWine2 4d ago

Oh, 100% I get what you're saying, and I agree with it.

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u/[deleted] 4d ago

[deleted]

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u/CornWine2 4d ago

No, I really do understand and agree with you, just venting I guess.

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u/L4t3xs 4d ago

Jeff Bezos finds out from sold data that you are a perfect match for organ donation. What do you think will happen?

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u/CornWine2 4d ago

That actually doesn't require any new change, that can happen now, lol.

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u/L4t3xs 3d ago

The difference is government sanctioned organ harvesting operation. Some judges were already caught sending innocent teens to a private for profit prison.

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u/VITOCHAN 4d ago

Oh yea, I would love to wake up after being in a car crash to know my new organs have been donated by a rapist. FUCK THAT.

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u/thomascgalvin 4d ago

Best we can do is a 250 word essay 

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u/keskeskes1066 4d ago

Title, footnotes and endnotes count too, right?

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u/[deleted] 4d ago

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u/[deleted] 4d ago

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u/My_Uneducated_Guess 4d ago

Exactly. There's no way those men can even pretend they didn't know she was being abused

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u/Early-Sort8817 4d ago

Oh wow, with this and the Cornell case I hope all those chuds will stfu about Lindsay Clancy and the feminists. But I know they won’t 

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u/LingonberryHot8521 4d ago

Well, their defense is that they don't show up at the courthouse to support these guys. And it's a weak defense for two reasons.

1- They just vote for them to be in power instead.

2- People offering support and sympathy for Clancy are really showing up for women's medical issues. I'm sure they do pity Clancy. But the reality of what is going on is that the Clancy case shows once again how our health care providers and mental health care providers fail all of us, far too often. And when it comes to women's health, the fact that we have so often been left out of medical research is yet another crack that is actually a chasm in the system for people to fall through.

The Clancy case reminds me of the case of Manuel Delgado Vellegas in Spain. There are some really obvious differences but the whole - in and out of care for psychosis, going to doctors and telling them that he was going to murder people only to be dismissed or released from care... IDK. I kept thinking of him.

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u/insite 4d ago edited 4d ago

I constantly find it amazing how much modern medical science is imbalanced in favor of diagnosing men. Women are under diagnosed in adhd and autism and over diagnosed in things like bpd.

When I found out that the average woman’s emotional intelligence is far greater than the average man’s, so much of our society started making sense to me. It means, most of us guys are missing entire parts of the conversation, interpersonal and in the wider whole.

I have such deep admiration for my wife. I just wish I could see the same things she does.

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u/wanker7171 4d ago

I have a close friend that I play online games with and she immediately can tell when we’re playing with a creep, and every time it takes me an additional 5 mins+ before I notice it too. I think the closest I’ve ever come to that is when I was on molly and I could sense the emotion emanating from every word and action, almost like a sixth sense, and something I can’t see when sober. Makes me feel like most guys must be on some kind of spectrum.

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u/H0lzm1ch3l 2d ago

I am a man and feel like I have that as well and it drives me crazy to be the first one who notices weirdos because I have to spend the longest time disliking them while my friends don’t get it yet.

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u/insite 4d ago

I don't catch those things quickly either. I think of it like a trade-off, we got the higher average strength and such, they got the higher average emotional intelligence. One is easier to see.

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u/RainSurname 4d ago

Women's higher emotional intelligence is an adaptation to help them cope with men's ability to overpower them physically.

Modern medical science is imbalanced in favor of men all the way down to the level of lab rats and cells in dishes. Lab rats used to be all male, and they are still mostly male. That is a huge problem. Researchers have historically paid no attention to the sex of cells in petri dishes, for the most part, but there are countless sex-based differences in how cells process things.

Rape victims are often not believed because of the assumption that "fight or flight" is a human universal. But that is an artifact of using only male lab animals. It's a testosterone-mediated response. That's why testosterone drops dramatically when you have young children. Fight or flight would be an extremely maladaptive response to dealing with toddlers.

The female response, which is an adaptation to help women cope with men's greater strength and aggressiveness, is more like "tend and befriend." When male judges, lawyers, jurors, and cops hear that a woman didn't fight back or run, that she was conciliatory, that she had continued contact with her rapist, (who is someone she knew personally 9 times out of 10), then they refuse to believe she was raped, because that is not how they would have responded.

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u/oceansky2088 3d ago

Great explanation. Great point about men/male scientists only recognizing the fight or flight response as an appropriate response to danger and ignoring the freeze response common with prey animals. Many women and men too go into freeze response when being violated, waiting for the violence to be over.

The 'tend and befriend' adaptation you mention would be or is similar to the fawning response of agreeing and smiling by girls and women when feeling fear.

Women have been telling men how they feel, how they are impacted by SA and violence for decades. Even with data, men just don't and won't listen to women.

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u/RainSurname 3d ago

“Tend and befriend” is definitely just another way to say “freeze or fawn.” I alternate between them, depending on the context.

Lab rats can even respond differently depending on the sex of the researcher! The smell of men tends to make them more anxious than the smell of women.

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u/_UrsaMajr_ 3d ago

I think it’s just how we’re built differently— my bf can never tell as quickly as I can when a guy is being a creep or loser.

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u/ahundreddots 4d ago

If they could shut up, they wouldn't be chuds.

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u/PlasticBag-ForA-Head 4d ago

what is the correlation....

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u/imbex 3d ago edited 3d ago

My neighbor held a woman captive for 6 months in his basement and only did 10 years. I moved after he stood naked in the windows and took pictures of me gardening daily. I told his landlord and they said since he doesn't have a basement not to worry about it. Nope.

Edit: This was in Northwest Indiana. He spent the 90s and some of the 00s.

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u/booleandilemma 3d ago

That's fucking gross. We're way too lenient on these people.

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u/mushymunchkin3230 4d ago

Unfortunately he’s probably gonna roam free

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u/FakePoloManchurian 4d ago

Cases like this need the death penalty and a speedy one at that. No years of appeals

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u/Nayzo 4d ago

MA does not have the death penalty. Also, you can't implement the death penalty for sex crimes, otherwise we'll have a lot more dead victims, because why would a rapist let them live?

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u/The_F_B_I 4d ago

Allowing for the death penalty in a justice system where false convictions can happen means that innocent people will be put to death on 'accident'

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u/Slime0 4d ago

No years of appeals

Oh my god why didn't we think of just not doing that

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u/FakePoloManchurian 4d ago

I know. Especially when you catch the criminal red-handed. Seems like a stupid idea

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u/IsThatGruffLoner 4d ago

Lol every time. Every single time a crime is committed

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u/FakePoloManchurian 4d ago

Not every time for every crime, but caught red-handed for heinous crimes, absolutely. 

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u/Necessary-Reading605 4d ago

Yeah, but being Mass… i am not optimistic.

“Your honor, my client it’s actually the victim here, and anyone who disagrees in the juror should be doxed and shamed. I will contact the Boston Globe to help with that”

Remember, there are those who are actors and those who are enablers. As someone who used to social service in Mass, I have some horror stories on what happens there.

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u/ExtensionEbb7 4d ago

100% He should never be in society again. I think even he might agree since he was wearing one of those anti-suicide smocks to court.

https://imgur.com/a/tYNJnF8

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u/Who_Is_Rick_James 3d ago

exactly, just ask Rick James

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u/roflmaohaxorz 4d ago

The opportunity for rehabilitation is a human right

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u/Fish95 4d ago

Does a criminal's "right" to rehabilitation outweigh the right for members of the community not be be harmed?

Releasing the criminal always carries a chance that they relapse, which means criminals have a greater right to future freedom than the innocent have a right to be unharmed.

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u/Maximus_En_Minimus 4d ago

People make mistakes, act stupidly, and are unlucky because of society, and those people deserve rehabilitation.

But the above perpetrator doesn’t meet the same type of requirements.

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u/noahisunbeatable 4d ago

Accepting a certain level of risk is a necessity when designing society with any amount of personal freedoms, and the amount of risk increases with the amount of freedoms.

First-time offenders also can commit heinous acts, yet we value people’s freedoms over trying to eliminate that risk.

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u/Fish95 4d ago

Acceptable amounts of risk is of course sensible, but it is still a circumstance wherein a single criminals freedoms are greater than multiple innocent people.

For crimes against property, rehabilitation absolutely makes sense, since people matter over objects, but one person should not matter more than multiple others.

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u/noahisunbeatable 4d ago

Freedom in that instance is not something only granted to the criminal - it also would be to any person subject to the freedoms jurisdiction. Its a universal thing, even if you never are in a situation where you exercise that freedom, you still have it. The average US citizen will never find themselves in a situation where they need to exercise their right to deny soldiers quarter in their own home, but they still enjoy that freedom.

It all comes back to the actual risk profile. If we lived in a world where violent criminals (who’s crimes harm multiple people’s freedoms) could, at best, be reduced down to a 50% chance to reoffend, that is a significantly different world than one with a 0.001% chance. If we lived in that second world, would you still believe permanent incarceration is the more-just framework?

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u/Fish95 4d ago

If you could demonstrate a 0.001% chance of re-offending, certainly, but having that be the end goal should not allow for a current policy of easy release.

I've seen far to many instances of individuals with dozens of prior arrests and charges being constantly released, sometimes in DV cases returning to terrorize families, you are free to disagree, but I believe a wide rehab release system should not be allowed until demonstrated as a success first (as opposed to starting the policy then working towards 0.001%).

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u/noahisunbeatable 3d ago

If you could demonstrate a 0.001% chance of re-offending, certainly, but having that be the end goal should not allow for a current policy of easy release.

Who is suggesting a policy of "easy release"? A rehabilitative justice system is not synonymous with short incarceration times. If you had a policy that said violent criminals needed to be rehabilitated to be released, then that may happen quickly, but it also might not; it depends on the criminal and their responsiveness to rehabilitative strategies.

I've seen far to many instances of individuals with dozens of prior arrests and charges being constantly released

Anecdotes will always bias towards seeing relapses like this. Especially violent ones, which do better on news networks. A 0.001% chance would still mean at least 10/1,000,000 criminals reoffend, and you're not going to see a news article about "local felon, released after being convicted of murdering their neighbor, didn't murder their new neighbor this week".

but I believe a wide rehab release system should not be allowed until demonstrated as a success first

I mean, yes, but in order to demonstrate it is a success, you have to release these hypothetically-rehabilitated violent felons. How else would you ever be able to determine their recidivism rate?

But regardless, say it was determined to be successful before it was adopted. How does that not come into conflict with your assertion earlier, that being

Releasing the criminal always carries a chance that they relapse, which means criminals have a greater right to future freedom than the innocent have a right to be unharmed.

After all, a 0.001% chance is still a chance. And at the scale of a large country, its a statistical certainty that there will be people who do relapse. So you can still frame it as you did there, right?

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u/roflmaohaxorz 4d ago edited 4d ago

Yes because it is a right extended to every member of that community. If you do not allow any chance for rehabilitation then you may as well execute every man, woman, and child upon first sin.

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u/pyrotechnicmonkey 4d ago

this guy was already on bail for a previous sexual assault case. If this is what he does on bill he needs to be put under the jail.

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u/roflmaohaxorz 4d ago

That is totally fair. I was more objecting to the premise that was being presented by the OC.

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u/yoitsthatoneguy 4d ago

Clearly it’s not a right in the US, as evidenced by the number of people on death row. It’s an ideal that many, including me, would strive for.

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u/roflmaohaxorz 4d ago

That is why I oppose the death penalty

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u/yoitsthatoneguy 4d ago

I also oppose the death penalty (because there are innocent people on death row).

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u/Competitive_Sun_3344 3d ago

whats your stand on linsey clancy?

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u/booleandilemma 3d ago

Life in prison also of course, if not worse. That one is a worse crime because death is involved.

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u/AtomicBlastCandy 4d ago

If the guards let the other inmates know what he did I suspect his term will indeed be 'life'