Last I checked you couldn't shoot/kill intruders. Maybe it's just Arizona.

In a lot of states you can respond with deadly force to armed intruders under certain conditions. Most of those states you can if your life is threatened, and most of those say that you have to attempt to retreat from the person threatening you first before you can begin firing.

In Florida (my state) and Texas (maybe others too), however, if anyone breaks into your house you have a right to shoot them to death; no questions asked. Florida is a "castle law" state, which means you don't have to retreat before firing. You can likewise fire out of your house and shoot someone who is threatening you on your property. If attacked in most public places you don't need to attempt to retreat before you defend yourself. If someone breaks into my house while I'm there I therefore have the right to put a few 7.62x39mm bullets into them, regardless if I see that they're armed or not. It's just not worth the risk.

It's not stupid or even wrong, it's just not really relevant.

I hate to judge without all the facts, but it sounds like at least this judge, and possibly Australia as a whole, really sucks at the law. It's right that the father should face jail time, but I don't understand why the judge is effectively treating something that happened after the crime as mitigating circumstances. If anything, it ought to be the other way around; the fact that the guy who got beaten molested a child ought to mitigate the father's sentence.

It's not quite right to say that this sentence sanctions vigilantism, because the harsh sentence they gave the father is a pretty hefty deterrent to that kind of behavior. It's more as though they're treating the beatdown as "time served," which is kind of ****ed up for a very different reason: It punishes society as a whole for an individual's vigilantism by releasing someone who ought to be imprisoned.

One caveat: Ordinary incarceration has not proven to be a terribly effective way of dealing with some kinds of child molesters. If this is a case where the judge has decided that rehabilitation is likely to be more effective, then I'm not really in any position to dispute that.



Varies by jurisdiction. In Texas (for example), a person is not obligated to retreat rather than use deadly force in self-defense unless he is certain he can completely avoid the threat by retreating, and if he is in his home or workplace, he has no obligation to retreat at all.