The Los Angeles Tiimes has a riveting story on its front page today:
MY neighbor was a child molester.
I know because of the signs.
Michael Miletti’s face, name and address appear on posters lining Wapello Street in Altadena, with the admonishment: “Leave Our Neighborhood Now Child Molester.” Up since May, the signs are staked into lawns, taped to trash cans and nailed to tree trunks.
I live around the corner with my wife and 7-year-old daughter. Suddenly, an issue that had seemed abstract became deeply personal.
The article is written by Peter Hong, who lives around the corner from Miletti. As he says, his account isn’t abstract, it’s deeply personal. It’s also morally ambiguous: should someone who has served his time in prison be forced out of a neighborhood without any evidence that he presents a danger? Miletti was convicted of abusing his daughter and served his prison time. When he married a widow in Altadena (next door to Pasadena), he registered according to the requirements of the California sex offender laws. Since then, his neighbors have been trying to force him to move out of their neighborhood. Recidivism rates for sexual offenders is 40%, but Miletti maintains that he isn’t a pedophile (he says he began abusing his daughter for emotional and psychological reasons following the sudden death of his wife).
This is such a compelling story because both sides are right. Hong hasn’t painted this in black and white, but shades of gray. Here’s the side of those that want him to leave:
More than 30 houses line Miletti’s block, and most of them have signs calling for him to leave. One of the homes at the end of the block belongs to Erik Hargrave, 40. He recalled the day he and his wife received the mailer. It came on his daughter’s second birthday. His wife, who had recently given birth to their second child, burst into tears.
Hargrave and about a dozen neighbors met at Farnsworth Park’s Greek-style amphitheater. There was anxiety over having a sex offender on a block with so many young children. They also discussed the potential effect his presence could have on property values and decided both to post the signs and create an e-mail distribution list.
Another of the anti-Miletti organizers, Joseph Llorens, the father of a 12-year-old boy, lives across the street from Hargrave. A manager for a utility company, Llorens, 44, had actually been a friend of Miletti’s wife; he had joined her and her then-husband for Thanksgiving dinner a few years ago.
“I do not want him to harm children in our area,” he said. “I cannot protect the whole world; my goal is just to get him out of our area.”
Then there are those on the other side of the debate:
Some of those who are most against vilifying Miletti live closest to him.
Wayne Weiss, 58, a documentary filmmaker who lives across the street, said he finds the signs unsightly. He thinks they so dominate the streetscape that the neighborhood could end up defined by them.
“They’ve got Christmas Tree Lane over there,” he said, gesturing across Lake Avenue to the neighborhood famous for its holiday light displays. “Is this going to become Pedophile Lane?”
Hari Nayar, 48, and Ruth Landsberger, 47, who have two children ages 9 and 6, also live across the street. The couple don’t know Miletti and his wife, and they don’t feel their children are endangered. Sexual abuse typically is inflicted by family members or friends, they believe, as it was in Miletti’s case. The state’s Megan’s Law website confirms their view, noting that 90% of child victims know their abuser, with almost half the offenders being a family member.
As they discussed their views with me, their 6-year-old listened in while their 9-year-old sat nearby reading “How The Grinch Stole Christmas.”
The sign campaign “may not be teaching these guys good values,” Landsberger said. “It is not teaching tolerance. It’s more like vigilantism.”
I appreciate the ambiguity, the shades of gray in this story, because it requires us to be humble. We often think our legal system is able not just to judge a person’s guilt or innocence, but their soul as well. The theological argument is that governments are acting as God’s agents on earth, and when judges impose a sentence they are meting out God’s own justice. Thus, God is on our side, and we are free to judge as harshly as we see fit.
Bunk.
No legal system can judge a person’s soul and deliver the punishment they truly deserve, nor the grace they truly deserve. Jesus tells us that we aren’t to judge others, but are to leave judgment in God’s hands. What our justice system can do, and do well, is to deter crime. By imposing consequences on criminal behavior, we create a disincentive for those behaviors, and hopefully dramatically reduce their frequency. The purpose of these deterrents is to protect our selves, our families, and our property, but not to deliver judgment in God’s stead. If we are truly to follow Jesus’ commands, we should forgive, and even love, the sex offender even as we sentence them to prison for their actions. There is no conflict between the forgiveness and the punishment – we do what we have to do to protect society, all the while recognizing that redemption is available even to the child molester.
So when we look at a convicted child molester in our midst, the same thiinking should pertain. We can’t judge the man’s soul. He is a sinner, but then so are we, and we all need forgiveness and grace. If the job of judging is lifted from our shoulders, then all have left to do is to protect our children and love our neighbor. So the question in this situation isn’t the state of Miletti’s soul, but whether he is still a danger to children, and if so how to protect them.
Here’s the part that bothered me:
Llorens and Hargrave once got into a heated exchange with Miletti over their signs. The two raised their voices in anger, while Miletti remained calm.
Llorens felt Miletti wanted to bait him or Hargrave into hitting him so he could make some kind of claim against them, he said. No blows were struck. Miletti also offered to tell his story, Llorens recalled. “I said I don’t even want to know. How can you justify doing that to a 6-year-old?” Llorens told Miletti to go home, which he did.
Mr. Llorens is not interested in learning more about Milietti so he can determine whether he is still a danger. It’s all judgment, with no door open to grace. The least his neighbors owe Miletti is to hear his story. With this article, now they have.
And what about the author? He concludes:
I did not enjoy meeting Michael Miletti. I wanted him to show more remorse. I thought a father who had harmed his child ought to outwardly display torment. Forever.
But perhaps his behavior reflected his having had 13 years to come to terms with his sins, while my expectations were based on learning of them only months ago.
In any case, Miletti’s obligations are to the law, not to me. I know he has paid for his crime and has led a law-abiding life ever since. Yet I will keep my child away from him. That is good enough for me.
I know it’s not enough for some of my neighbors. The signs remain on Wapello Street. Those who want Miletti out are planning pickets outside his house. They will not stop, they say, until he leaves.
Jesus’s commandment that we shouldn’t judge others is incredibly difficult to follow, as is his commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves. And the first commandment is the corollary of the second – we do not want others to judge us, and especially not before they’ve heard our story. The residents of Wapello Street owe Mr. Milleti no less.
