They are hunting registrants in California
The woman accused of shooting up a home for registered sex offenders in Fresno, California on August 30th was in court on yesterday. Jennifer Cedano faces four felony charges, including assault with a semi-automatic firearm. She opened fire in the home hitting one man. Within a month of that incident, in Freemont, California, Varun Suresh stabbed and killed a 71 year old registrant he found on the registry. He told police it was “really fun”. Are these two incidents close in time and close in proximity random or a dangerous escalation of vigilante justice against people on the sex-offender registry in California? We suggest they are warning signals that the publication and promotion of registrant’s data and images online sanctions violence and extrajudicial punishment.
ACSOL warned about this more than a decade ago. Attorney Janice Bellucci had to sue the state in 2015 to include the date of offense on the registry data (as they were required to do by law but didn’t), so people wouldn’t think these cases were recent. Still, that doesn’t seem to matter to most vigilantes, as the case of the 71 year old man killed last month had committed his offense more than 33 years ago.
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When you dehumanize a group of people and make it socially acceptable to do things like this, you can only expect these things to increase.
agreed 100%