Just introducing myself, I'm gracehatter and a lifelong student of crime and the legal system. I look forward to meeting you all.
Hello gracehatter, welcome to CMM. Is there any crime/legal cases that you've followed that you would like to post about on the forum. If so, please do so.
For those of you who are interested and wondered why I would start a crime forum, it's simple. I've been interested in the legal system, how it works, crime, why people commit crimes for a long time. But it goes deeper than that.
A close friend's father was murdered. It was a brutal murder.
Our friend's father and his wife had traded babysitting services with my parents when we were all babies and toddlers.
A punk renting a tiny house on a small patch of land from our friend's father, wasn't bothering to pay his rent. He'd been told the day before that he was going to have to vacate the premises.
The punk thought that if he killed him, he'd be able to keep the property.
What he didn't seem to grasp was that the property our friend owned, had been long ago signed over to his grandson. Even if he hadn't signed it over to a family member, his children would never have allowed the punk to keep it or stay on it. The oldest son was aware of the impending eviction.
Our friend was a bit frail, having suffered from multiple medical issues and was pretty much confined to a hospital bed in his home. But he fought hard for his life.
The inside of his home was a horrible sight. But even that paled beside what was done to him. He just wouldn't die. So the punk got tired of beating him and strangled him with a lamp cord.
The family would have preferred the death penalty. The punk is serving the rest of his life in a prison, that to many inmates, living there is worse than death. The family prefers him in prison, in Angola, Louisiana, existing there versus walking the streets after a few years.
In many cases the family, the victims, are forgotten, unless you are a member of the family, or a friend, or someone who lives close to where the case occurred.
And yet everyone seems to know the perp's name.
So on CMM, I decided to put the victim's names first. To highlight not only well known cases in the media, but other cases that may not have garnered a lot of national media.
Like others, I never thought that such a horrible crime would occur to anyone I knew personally.
Each life taken, each crime committed, affects not only the victim, and their families, but many, many others around them. Friends, acquaintances, society, the town, city, county, parish, or state.
Even, the nation.
Crime of any sort touches each of us in some way.
