Helpless bystanders

Listen to Dave’s Commentary: Helpless bystanders

Josh Powell was a familiar name in Washington and Utah. In 2009, he claimed that he returned from a midnight camping trip with his two young boys near their Utah home to find his wife missing without a trace.

He moved to Washington with the boys to be near his family. But yesterday, during a court supervised visit, he locked the childcare worker out of the house, and blew the place up with his boys inside. Neighbors couldn’t believe it.

“I’m glad he died. I’m glad he died.”

Nobody believed the story that Josh had simply gone on a midnight camping trip. But there was NO body, and the boys being 2 and 4 couldn’t tell the police much.

Over the past three years, the cops only found enough to take the boys and place them with his missing wife’s parents. Josh didn’t like that; claimed his in-laws were turning his sons against him, but a judge told him last week that to get them back he would have to sit down with a psychologist and a polygraph. And there was something else: according to a lawyer hired by his in-laws, the boys, now 7 and 5, were remembering things about that night:

“They had gone camping, their mother had been in the truck, and later their mom and dad walked out into the dessert and mommy got lost.”

And the cops had always had a gut instinct about him. So could this horrible thing have been prevented? Sure. If cops had been allowed to lock Josh up indefinitely based on gut instinct. But our system doesn’t allow that. And in the meantime, nothing stirs stronger passions than love and hate, and when emotion takes over, the law is just one more helpless bystander.

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