Punishing pedophiles

What's a suitable punishment for someone who would sneak into a neighbor's house, kidnap a 9-year-old girl, violate her, kill her and bury her in the yard?

On a week when Congress turned its attention to baseball's steroid shenanigans and Terri Schiavo's right to live or die, here is an issue worthy of their outrage.

Police recovered the body of 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford around 3:30 this morning using information supplied by John Evander Couey, a former neighbor and registered sex offender. The discovery ended a mystery that captured the nation's attention ever since the young girl was discovered missing from her bedroom on Feb. 24.

It's hard not to share the devastation of Jessica's parents, Mark Lunsford and Angela Bryant. From all accounts, Jessica was a special child. Her father and grandparents say she would always ask permission before leaving the house. Jessica laid the next day's school clothes out before going to bed. She woke herself up with her own alarm clock. She regularly attended church. She was a good kid.

I remember thinking that she sounded almost perfect. Speaking as one who has raised a 9 year old, I would pay good money to get those kinds of results. No person deserves such a horrific fate, but it seems even more tragic when it happens to a child — especially one who exhibits that level of responsibility and maturity at such a young age. With a start like that, Jessica had to be on the road to great things.

But now she has been derailed from that path.

In the hierarchy of crimes, pedophilia ought to occupy a special place. If ever there was an express lane to hell, pedophiles should have reserved seating.

Unfortunately, the plight of Mark Lunsford is not an uncommon one. The U.S. Department of Justice reports that in a one-year period, 797,500 children were reported missing. That is an average of 2,100 children reported missing each day. What's more, 198,300 children were involuntarily missing, lost, or injured over the course of a year. Nonfamily members abducted 58,200 children in the same time period.

Thousands of parents empathize with Mark Lunsford's tragedy tonight.

But what do we do with the convicted predators? John Evander Couey admitted kidnapping and killing Jessica Lunsford. Priests around the country are admitting or are being convicted of preying on young parishioners. And these are the few cases that attract media attention. Thousands of people like Couey are plotting to take someone else's child tonight.

Many people take quiet pleasure in knowing that the prison code will exact a certain level of revenge.

They nodded with satisfaction when a fellow inmate beat serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer to death with a lead pipe. You remember Dahmer gained infamy by killing 17 young men between 1978 and 1991. The prevailing wisdom was that the system worked, even if it was unofficial.

We shouldn't have to depend on vigilante prison justice, however. What John Evander Couey did was vile. His punishment should be severe enough to dis-courage any other potential pedophiles from violating another child.

But Congress spent the week meddling in a major league dispute between labor and management and refereeing a family feud that was being adjudicated in the state courts. I don't mean to trivialize those issues, but I'm not convinced they needed Congressional intervention.

Here's an issue that does. I'm not usually a proponent of the death penalty, but I'm willing to break with my longstanding objections for the John Couey's of the world. A conviction of child molestation or pedophilia should bring a response that is quick and severe. In the majority of those convictions, the sentence should be death.

That law should be enacted at the federal level. There should be no escape across a state line for a convicted sex offender. They shouldn't have the opportunity to move across the street from a 9-year-old child, unbeknownst to the parents, and plot. This is a case for zero tolerance. On the first offense, pedophiles go behind bars for life. When it fits, they go behind bars to await death.

Members of Congress, this is an issue to get outraged about. Pass a law. Send a message. Do something useful.