A number of years ago we used to have law and order; you committed a crime, you went to court and then to jail. That all has changed.
The recent article by Jim Kenyon about a man charged with assaulting not one but two Lebanon police officers while he was in a drunken stammer and then getting let off on a technicality due to some errors one of those officers had made on an unrelated case tells me this: he got away with it (“Legal saga continues”; Oct. 11). Now he wants a few million dollars because he was drunk and stupid, got out of the passenger side of his wife’s car and started arguing with the police. He deserves nothing but a couple months in jail and a fine for disorderly conduct.
Now, getting back to the ’70s, when police were respected or there were consequences. In Hartford, if you got out and refused to listen you were woken up by a billy club and locked up in the cells under the municipal building. In Lebanon, in a more conservative state, you were treated the same and if that failed, you were shot. In the end, you learned to respect the police. And they were all pretty good officers back then.
Today, criminals have more rights than victims. Our streets are full of loud-mouthed punks and our police are always at fault due to some low-life lawyer and an even lower-life judge and all the save-the-world liberals. This needs to change. We need to go back to the ’70s and start over, find a woman like the late Barbara Chase to run the prisons, get judges who do not let cases get dragged on for years when the evidence of overwhelming guilt is present, no cell phones or televisions in our prisons and victims had rights. And Jim Kenyon studied his facts better about these folks before he tried to make drunken thugs into heroes.