OK, it's just a cat. But that's not the point.
Cheyenne Cherry gives every indication of being a seventeen year-old girl wholly lacking a moral compass. If she has a conscience, or a coherent concept of right and wrong, she hides it well.
Last May 6, she and a friend broke into her former roommate's apartment, destroyed her furniture, stole some DVDs and- as a "joke-" put the roommate's kitten in the oven and roasted it alive. She protests that it was her friend who actually put the cat in the oven and turned it on. She merely "didn't let it out."
This is not Cherry's first run-in with the law. Last year she and her boyfriend used a BB-gun to steal a dog. She also has an arrest on her record for armed robbery. She is currently in jail for violating probation.
Wednesday a New York judge accepted a plea agreement by which four of the six counts in the indictment against this sick young woman were dropped. She will serve a year in jail.
Has Cherry learned her lesson? Judge for yourself: as she left the court, she passed protesters demanding that she be dealt with more harshly. She grinned broadly, stuck out her tongue at one of them, and said of the kitten, "It's dead, bitch!"
I can well understand the anger of people whose rhetoric has gotten the better of them, suggesting that Cherry and her friend deserve to be put into a hot oven themselves. Yes, it was a cat, not a human being. And yes, Cherry herself is a human being- and we don't exact capital punishment, by torture or otherwise, from human beings for killing animals,
But behavior like this predicts that she may not confine herself to animals in the future. A person of Cherry's age sufficiently lacking in conscience not only to think that roasting a kitten alive was funny, but to react so flippantly and to show such little remorse when called to account for her act, is a threat to human life in the making. It's not just a matter of saying that she deserves a great deal worse than she's apparently going to get. The rest of us need protection from the monster she seems in the process of becoming- and we owe it to her, as well as to any potential future victims of any species, to take this behavior a great deal more seriously than New York's court system seems to be taking it.
HT: Drudge
Last May 6, she and a friend broke into her former roommate's apartment, destroyed her furniture, stole some DVDs and- as a "joke-" put the roommate's kitten in the oven and roasted it alive. She protests that it was her friend who actually put the cat in the oven and turned it on. She merely "didn't let it out."
This is not Cherry's first run-in with the law. Last year she and her boyfriend used a BB-gun to steal a dog. She also has an arrest on her record for armed robbery. She is currently in jail for violating probation.
Wednesday a New York judge accepted a plea agreement by which four of the six counts in the indictment against this sick young woman were dropped. She will serve a year in jail.
Has Cherry learned her lesson? Judge for yourself: as she left the court, she passed protesters demanding that she be dealt with more harshly. She grinned broadly, stuck out her tongue at one of them, and said of the kitten, "It's dead, bitch!"
I can well understand the anger of people whose rhetoric has gotten the better of them, suggesting that Cherry and her friend deserve to be put into a hot oven themselves. Yes, it was a cat, not a human being. And yes, Cherry herself is a human being- and we don't exact capital punishment, by torture or otherwise, from human beings for killing animals,
But behavior like this predicts that she may not confine herself to animals in the future. A person of Cherry's age sufficiently lacking in conscience not only to think that roasting a kitten alive was funny, but to react so flippantly and to show such little remorse when called to account for her act, is a threat to human life in the making. It's not just a matter of saying that she deserves a great deal worse than she's apparently going to get. The rest of us need protection from the monster she seems in the process of becoming- and we owe it to her, as well as to any potential future victims of any species, to take this behavior a great deal more seriously than New York's court system seems to be taking it.
HT: Drudge
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