The only kind I got - fast

[kyburg]

Remember Perverted Justice? (Weren't they one of the groups leveraging LJ back during the strikeout?)

They're being sued. Eh. Over their involvement in a NBC reality TV show. Eh. They were filming a show called "Dateline NBC: To Catch a Predator" - where they were luring people to locations posing as underage kids in chat rooms. And when someone didn't show - they tracked him back to his home....and the guy offed himself.

Eh.

Then you find out just how much "help" Perverted Justice and NBC really were....

Conradt Jr. became a target in a program in which NBC and the activist group Perverted Justice set up shop for four days last November in a two-story home in Murphy, Texas. Perverted Justice staff posed as boys and girls online and arranged to meet men there.

Two dozen men were arrested, but the district attorney refused to prosecute any of them, saying many of the cases were tainted by the involvement of amateurs and that he lacked jurisdiction in most cases because neither the suspects nor decoys were in the county during the online chats. The city manager was fired for approving the arrangement without telling the mayor or the city council.

I seriously doubt the correct authority, which is likely the FBI, would want anything to do with a plan that could not produce a prosecuteable case.

Good TV. Bah, I say. You got bupkis - except for people who sell soap.

The kids lose, we lose as a culture - and someone makes a mint. Business as usual, in today's America.

Sickening.

Comments

[lefresne.livejournal.com]

Good god. I'm all for the proper arrest and prosecution of pedophiles and have extremely hardcore feelings for those caught molesting kids or harming them in anyway but this show...I tried to watch it once and I was disgusted--on the one side you have the prurient bread and circuses side of NBC and on the other the disgusting pedophiles. I don't understand why this is on TV and not in the hands of the FBI or the police. It's totally worthless if no one is prosecuted too.

[n6vfp.livejournal.com]

It's another case of 'sleaze' TV being called 'news' (I think that was what Dateline was originally), while the pedophiles may have been disgusting, the whole involvement with the police made the whole case suspect.

No, shows like that just don't bring justice, as the person is convicted in a public forum without trial. I think inthis country a court convicts, not a TV audience. In these cases, I wonder how much ended up on the cutting room floor.

[gretchen-marie.livejournal.com]

I think there's a value in televising, or at least publicizing, things like this. Abuse in many forms takes place in hiding, and perpetrators take comfort in that secrecy. There's a difference between publicizing and sensationalizing, though, and this episode seems to have crossed the line.

I believe PJ does a public service; like many groups who do, they've gotten caught up in their own fervor and lost sight of logic and reality. It's akin to my own field (domestic and sexual violence victim advocacy), where anti-male rhetoric often rules, despite the fact that it does nothing but feed the mythology about man-hating lesbians in this work.

Dateline NBC should have been working with all available law enforcement who might have jurisdiction (i.e. the FBI); however, setting up a high-profile sting kind of defeats the purpose of said sting. I do believe the D:NBC show has resulted in a number of successful prosecutions in the past, so they're not complete amateurs at this. It makes me wonder how much of the district attorney's refusal to prosecute is political, the desire to not align himself with the media circus.

In the end, the man who shot himself did so while he was in the process of committing a crime (erasing evidence of a potential crime), so I have very little sympathy for him. The PJ-NBC crew should have stopped once they'd reported that to the police; they shouldn't have been there shooting.

[tomlemos.livejournal.com]

Instead of heading into our cities and helping out the homeless youth who are victimized IN PERSON, these folks set out for cyberspace.

I don't mean to say that it isn't as important, but c'mon, we've had this problem LONG before the internet.

There's always gonna be runaway kids and personally, I'd rather help the ones I see in front of me.

one more thing...

[tomlemos.livejournal.com]

I believe the arrest to conviction record for Dateline is 10 to 1.

Hardly seems worth it. Especially after 24 cases got tossed in Dallas alone this month.

[browren.livejournal.com]

I wonder how much ended up on the cutting room floor.

This is *exactly* the problem with both sleazy TV "news" and vigilante groups like PJ. How can it be proved that PJ's IRC logs haven't been edited? They have no transparency, they have no requirement to follow any kind of law enforcement procedures, and they aren't bound by the same kind of evidence gathering law as real law enforcement, so they can at any point choose to doctor their results.

And of course nobody ever gets to hear about the failures in either case.