Sarah Sands lived in the same complex with a convicted child molester, Michael Pleasted, who had a child-molesting criminal record dating back to 1970. Two weeks before he died, Michael Pleasted, aged 77, was charged with molesting two more boys. Sarah Sands killed him with a knife one night after coming to the conclusion that the law was not going to protect other boys from becoming victims. Whether or not she was right, she’s now doing time. Unlike Michael Pleasted, who was living the pedophiles life fairly normally and continuing to molest boys up until he was stabbed to death, Sandra Sands is now locked up in prison.

I don’t like that Ms. Sands took matters into her own hands. But it’s honestly very difficult for me to fault her. The laws concerning pedophilia in Britain and the US are downright ridiculous. It is common to hear of pedophiles molesting children for many years, living on probation in neighborhoods as registered sex offenders. As barbarous as it apparently seems to “civilized” countries, the traditional punishment for convicted molestation or kidnapping is death. For good reason. Pleasted was 77 and he apparently wasn’t stopping anytime soon on his own volition.

And this is just one of many cases where the justice system has failed to protect children from serial sex predators. A former Boy Scouts leader and corrections officer in New Jersey, also a pedophile, had used his reputation and clout to avoid life imprisonment after a few former Boy Scouts claimed he raped them. One of those Boy Scouts finally snapped. He stabbed the pedophile to death. He was convicted of manslaughter and will likely serve five to ten years in prison.

And there’s another case from Tennessee where a father beat up a pedophile who had tried to solicit sex from the father’s 4 and 7 year old girls. The pedophile got probation after a bond he posted the same day he was arrested. The father was so angry about the light sentence that he found the pedophile at his home and beat him up. The father ended up with a higher bond and a longer jail time than the sexual predator.

All of these stories indicate one thing: victims are not getting justice from the so-called justice system. Predators are being protected. In such a scenario, vigilante justice is bound to become ever more popular and ruthless.