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Comment by colpabar | Hacker News Reader

>She added: “Yes, he was my election agent. This was one of a number of ways I was seeking to reconcile my relationship with my father after coming out of care. On reflection, I can understand that it was unacceptable for me to appoint my dad as my election agent when he had been arrested.”

Do you really think that someone hiring a convicted pedophile as their election agent isn't a big deal? Doesn't it make you wonder why reddit hired this person, and then made a top-down effort to suppress their name?

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Well, minor nit here, the father was not convicted when they were hired.

They received 22 years when they were convicted, so unlikely to be working anywhere.

But who knows what the father told his child. I mean most reasonable people would not believe their parent capable of such horrors, even if they were charged.

> I mean most reasonable people would not believe their parent capable of such horrors, even if they were charged.

Blind faith in friends/family is absolutely NOT reasonable. If I'm supposed to believe a system convicts strangers accurately, then it follows people you know are accurately convicted.

You seem to have a problem with the arrest / conviction timeline.

The father was arrested, hired, then convicted and sent to jail. It is entirely possible to believe one's friends & family after their arrest, but completely change your mind once they are convicted.

What am I missing here?

Edit: maybe you are unfamiliar with Western justice systems where people are able to post a bond and remain free until the verdict and/or sentencing phase?

The father was hired after his arrest. To me, that's troubling. It suggests bad judgement...and the Greens and Lib. Dems both agree with me.

Further, I don't believe in the existence of a 50 year old man who one day decides to rape and torture a 10 year old child. I believe he's guilty of more than that though I have nothing to support that assertion except my priors about how pedophilia works. Nevertheless, I'm fairly confident of those priors and so is our justice system: there's a reason sex offenders are forced to register.

Progressives seem unable to ferret out deeply troubling behavior as long as it is associated with certain minority groups. I do fear for backlash against innocent people by those with the opposite bias but that's no excuse to downplay what's going on here.

I absolutely 100% agree with you.

But I am trying to decide if the internet brigade is upset because they think this person is guilty of more than they are letting on, or if they are guilty of extremely poor judgment, and the internet is never going to let them forget it.

I further wonder how long people can be punished for exercising extremely poor judgment, or at least making the wrong call when the optics are already extremely poor.

>I further wonder how long people can be punished for exercising extremely poor judgment, or at least making the wrong call when the optics are already extremely poor.

I really think you're being too generous. If someone told me their chosen campaign manager was a man who had been arrested for raping and torturing a child, conviction or not, I would not give this person the benefit of the doubt. She claims she didn't know the "extent of the crimes" - even if that's true, it's a complete failure on her end, because she should have known. I also find it very concerning that reddit would hire a person with a history of "extremely poor judgement" as an admin (it's already concerning she's a mod of so many subreddits) given that reddit has millions of users and lots of them are children.

I'm going to presume we mean literal torture here, and not rape being akin to torture.

Sadistic behavior is indeed a risk factor which puts someone at a heightened risk of re-offending over other child rapists (this isn't to say sadistic fantasy will lead to such crimes in someone who is more empathetic).

If the individual is psychopathic, there have been some recent breakthroughs which show it is possible to treat such individuals, but researchers call for more research in this area. A couple of programs look promising.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/opinion/when-junk-science... Not all sex offenders have the same risk factor (sex offense is a very vague term, and unfortunately, one people associate strongly with the worst kinds), and the risk factor for a lot of them is fairly low.

Courts are moving towards more individualized assessments of recidivism to determine what tier of risk they should assign someone to.

There are a few questions I would ask here in connection to this case:

Has he been taking any sort of drug?

Does he have any mental health issues?

Has he had any recent head injuries?

Does he have a brain tumor?

>What am I missing here?

I guess you are missing the tendency of most people to decide that a man who was arrested for torturing and raping a child should not be a part of any kind of governmental campaign. I understand he wasn't yet convicted, and that presumption of innocence is fundamental to our justice system. But I also understand that charges like these don't appear out of thin air, and that charges are usually only made by authorities if a conviction is highly probable. And finally, I find it pretty absurd that one could live in the same house as this person and not have a clue as to what was going on.

Just imagine being in the green party and hearing about this. "Hey guys, I chose my dad as my manager. He's currently on trial for torturing and raping a child, but fingers crossed!!!"

Her father was charged in 2016, hired by her in 2017, and sentenced in 2018.

If she was not aware at the time about the horrible events taking place in her home, between 2016 and 2017 whenever she has spoken to her father there must have been an elephant of just enormous proportions in the room.

Did she talk to him about this at all before hiring him? Did she end up being fully convinced by him that the allegations are false? If she were, how come she did not make great noise about her father being put in jail despite being innocent and only claims that she didn’t know?

No matter how you spin it, legal system is never perfect and there are dark grey areas that aren’t captured by law—the reason vetting/background check processes exist.

Who her husband is certainly isn't helping matters.

https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/something-rotten-at-the...

I actually got blinded by the first two mentions of conviction that it didn't even register that you said charged even though I quoted it. But still, blind faith is still unreasonable. Would you hire a stranger charged with rape if they gave you a serious alibi? A verifiable "I wasn't even in the country, here are receipts and photos" type alibi. Most people would say "we'll wait until the charges are dropped to make it official but you got the job".

One can believe in the system but still doubt it when personally affected by one of it's decision, as hypocrite as it might appear on a surface level, that's actually an entirely human reaction.

Pretty much everybody would ere on the side of the accused when they happen to be somebody they are very close with, like a parent, sibling or child, due to the emotional attachment we tend to have to people like that vs strangers.

If we're going to minor nit, they lied about the father's name to try to get that hire in under the radar and it led to their expulsion from the party.

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