We now join our previously scheduled rant already in progress...

Okay, back to the rants. I think this is the last one for awhile, don't hold me to that after all stupid things happen every day and I might just feel the need to talk about them.

So the Jerry Sandusky verdict came in over the weekend. He was found guilty in 45 out of 48 charges. Not a real surprise there when at the end of the trial when addressing the media the defense said they would be surprised if he was acquitted due to the overwhelming amount of evidence against him. The DEFENSE said this. Now maybe that was part of their plan for appeal, they say they didn't have time to adequately prepare, but who really knows. What I know is that he was found guilty. And due to the mandatory sentencing laws around some of the charges he will spend the rest of his life in jail.

I blogged about this when it was breaking news. And I was angry then. Really angry. I was angry at the people who were missing the point that this wasn't about the firing of a beloved coach but it was about a serial pedophile who had been left to run rampant for years. And I said it then, and I will say it again, if it had been your child would you still feel as though the school and the coach "did enough"? Because for me, it wasn't. What you had to do versus what they should have done has always been the issue for me. And when Sandusky's own legal team talked about the evidence against him....it boggles your mind.

During the trial there were snippets reported on the news. One of the things that struck me was in the court reporting cartoons that they draw he always seemed to have a little half smile on his face. Like he really felt he was going to walk out of there with a not guilty verdict. He released through his lawyer today that he just wanted people to know that he is not guilty no matter what the verdict was. Okay, Jerry, sure. There was also one night where they reported that the defense said he had a personality disorder. He suffers from Histrionic Personality Disorder. And that this explains why he was so overly affectionate in letters to the boys he molested. (I can stop using allegedly because he's guilty right?) Okay. I will give you that he has a personality disorder. He might very well have histrionic personality disorder as well though I would have gone with the more over all pedophilia diagnosis. But the thing that made me want to throw something at the TV when I heard that was how it was reported and talked about in such a way that we were supposed to feel sorry for Sandusky. Poor man suffers from a personality disorder...

I think I fall in to the camp of the Texas father on what should be done in stopping the abuse of a child. When his story broke last week our local news channel posted on Facebook to ask if people thought that he used "excessive force" in stopping the attack. My comment was is there an excessive use of force if you found someone raping your 5 year old? And when the 911 tapes were released and you could hear this man, and hear that he was genuinely worried that he had beaten the rapist to death you understand "crime of passion" a lot more and you understand that this father did what he had to do to protect his child. He wasn't out looking for a reason to hurt someone but in protecting his child, protecting her from the worst nightmare of a parent, his instinct took over and he did what I think many of us would have.  Brent and I agree that the only place we differ is in the fact that he seems remorseful that he killed the rapist. Neither of us thinks we would be.

So right now Sandusky is in jail. There is some sort of closure starting for his victims. Though it's going to take a lot more than a guilty verdict to heal their wounds. They might not ever be okay. Ever. He took kids that he was supposed to be helping, supposed to be bettering their lives and he hurt them in a way that we can't even let ourselves think about. And he did it over and over and over with new boys, new victims. He broke so many lives it's hard to wrap your brain around it. So he is in jail. On suicide watch. And I wouldn't be sad at all if someone handed him a rope and then turned their back for awhile.