Victorino already had a serious record of violent crime, and was on probation. Shouldn't that have clued them in that things could get mighty ugly as long as he was involved?Aren't the prisons of the US full of people whose parole has been revoked, or probation breached, for incredibly picayune transgressions? Isn't trespass kinda one of those?
There are not uncommonly situations in which someone is likely to be damned if s/he does and damned if s/he doesn't. Child welfare interventions come to mind. Parole and probation interventions are another. The future and all its contingencies are not foreseeable, and no one even has perfect knowledge of the present.
I haven't been able to figure out what he was on probation for at the time of the homicides. Presumably not a violent crime; I can't imagine that he would have been sentenced to probation for that. Is imprisoning someone for trespassing while on probation for a property offence reasonable?
Do people not usually do things like live in other people's breezeways
because they have no jobs and money?
Only in hindsight can the trespassing be seen as the precursor to the homicides. The retention of the possessions left behind was not justification for the assaults (obviously), but it was a necessary causal link. There was no way of anyone not involved in the situation foreseeing it occurring.
Now, when it reached *this* point (from one of the local6.com stories) --
The squatters warned Belanger that "they were going to come back there and beat her with a baseball bat when she was sleeping," ...
-- *that* is a threat to cause serious bodily harm or death, and *that* is something that should be taken notice of, and that something should have been done about. And if the problem was that the police did not know who the people they had rousted were, and so could not look for the person who had made the threat, then indeed, they were negligent in dealing with the trespass situation in the first place.
As to the diagnosis of "psychopath" being an automatic ticket to life imprisonment -- psychopathy is not actually a mental disease or defect, it is a personality disorder. It is not a basis for a "not guilty by reason of insanity" acquittal, and therefore not a basis for indefinite incarceration as "criminally insane". And not all, or even most, psychopaths are dangerously violent. There is simply no basis for preventively incarcerating psychopaths, generally, based on a diagnosis (which can be difficult and debatable) of psychopathy. And there isn't any basis for incarcerating anyone at all indefinitely, of course, unless some reason/necessity for doing so has been shown.
A more appropriate approach might be the one available in Canada, where an offender can be determined to be
dangerous, regardless of whether his/her dangerousness arises from psychopathy or sheer bloody-mindedness, upon conviction for certain serious offences against the person and evidence of the likelihood of recidivism in that respect, and then incarcerated indefinitely.
I have to comment on the previous offence as well. Nothing I've glanced at has indicated what the precipitating reasons for the assault committed were (again, I say nothing about
justification, and refer simply to the fact that there are reasons for everything anyone does, even if they're really bad ones).
But I'm minded of how we are often reminded hereabouts that in most homicides in the US, the victims are participants in illegal activities and were voluntarily at risk because of their activities and associations -- and how ordinary law-abiding people just aren't at such risk -- and how this fact is used to minimize the importance of those homicides in setting public policy.
If this offender's previous victim had fallen into that category, would the previous crime have been taken as an indication that he was a danger to ordinary members of the public? I'd say that if those who minimize the significance of all the homicides of "criminals" when it comes to setting public policy regarding firearms were to be consistent, they'd have to say "no".
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