understood, but the story requires that the victim and perp meet in the legal arena. he denied her a childhood it is possible a final act of cowardice will suppress her right to fair hearing.

Agreed, apparently his hearing of Elizabeth's evidence yesterday made him change his plea to guilty and his expression of regret.

Guardian

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'expressions of regret' are often cynically used by sociopaths and psychopaths in courtrooms and indeed also in politics. When said in a courtroom it will be to ensure his punishment is less severe than where no 'expression of regret' was given. The guilty plea (since what he did is obvious to a blind man), I would see as another cynical legal move and often happening for similar reasons as the 'expression of regret.'

Incredibly sad situation, too sad for words, I hope the children can achieve something we might consider 'normal' after all this.

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Mass Immigration - Not in my name
Liberal elites across the EU have taken Bertoldt Brechts advice and declared that the people have forfeited the confidence of the government, therefore the liberal elites have decided to dissolve the people and import another.

Regret that he got caught. He knew he was screwed so he kicked for touch. He should rot away in some small cell.

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"Sea! Is féidir linne freisin!" Eamon Gilmore

"We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

The Political Compass
Economic Left/Right: from -4.38 to -6.62
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: from -4.05 to -3.74

I hate to think about how easy Fritzls' sentence will be compared to even the first day of his victims captivity. I think we need to look long and hard at providing a suitable deterrent against crime for these kinds of people. Decades kept artifically alive in a dark, damp, sound-proofed and cramped coffin like cell hanging from manacles on bread and water with no human contact would be a more fitting deterrent to people like Fritzl than what I expect he will get.
Now that he is caught, he will love being well fed in the safety and comfort of some clean and bright segregated cell in prison in much better conditions than his victims lived in, knowing that noone there can bring revenge against him and that the state will treat him with kid gloves so long as he feigns remorse and seeks therapy. There will of course be no genuine remorse for the victims. Being discovered did not make Fritzl a better person. Fritzl lived cheerfully every day for decades with the knowledge of his crimes, was caught by accident and was only sorry he got caught. He will of course do what is in his own best interests by feigning remorse just as cynically as he feigned normality while his children suffered underground.

I agree. Something like this is in order:

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Elie Godsi wrote
Elie Godsi is a consultant clinical psychologist and author of Violence and Society: Making Sense of Madness and Badness

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