Accidental Sin

Two stories:

Yesterday, Richard Kelly walked into a store and robbed it. He threatened the store clerk and the patrons with a gun, asked for the money in the register, and sped off into the night with dollar bills flying loose from his brown paper bag.

When he was caught, he was charged with assault with a deadly weapon and armed robbery. But it just so happened that there was a young woman in the store at the time with an infant, so he was also charged with child endangerment - a crime that falls under the realm of child abuse - adding a particularly heinous dimension to his act and a few more years onto his jail time.

Last week, a group of high schoolers decided to ramp up their torment of a fellow classmate by beating her up, throwing her in a car and taking her to a house where they continued to verbally abuse her. After the young girl complained to police, the group was brought in and charged with assault and battery. But one small word added to their indictment - when the young girl was placed into the car, she asked to be let go, and one of her assailants said, "No", and pushed her back into the vehicle. Because of that small word and that act, the charge of kidnapping was added to the list.

I try to imagine the mindset of these people before they commit their crimes. We so often try to look at crime as some extenuating circumstance, a random act that came about from passion or from a failure to think things through logically. We forget how many crimes are done with forethought. With planning.

So I think of Richard Kelly in his apartment, cleaning his gun and going over his plans just one more time in his head. He knows when he'll strike, the route he'll take, and what he plans to say to the store clerk in order to speed the process up as fast as possible. He might have been methodical about this or might have been completely haphazard.

But it was only by chance that a woman was there with her child. This is something he could not and did not take into consideration, and it's something that destroyed any chance of leniency from a jury and will most likely add several years onto his sentence.

Isn't it always the crimes we don't mean to commit that get us in the end?

For the high schoolers, their deed was incredible. It's truly disgusting. They must have gotten together to plan it, probably a ring leader egging the others on, convincing them it was a good idea to jump this young girl. But something happened in the heat of the moment that they didn't plan on and didn't know could exacerbate an already growing list of violent crimes. Kidnapping. Unlawful imprisonment. In fact, if the district attorney felt like throwing the kitchen sink at them, he could at least try for a few counts of obstruction of justice since they threatened the young girl with more violence if she told the cops. I imagine doing so took a great amount of courage.

There's a third story here. One that you and I have. A time in our lives when we planned something, meant to do something or say something, but we failed to plan for that random occurrence that either kept it from being effective or made matters worse. I doubt even of us have had the occasion to plan a crime - except for me - but we certainly commit crimes on a daily basis. Whether it's as simple as not fulfilling a promise or saying the wrong thing to a friend. Maybe not calling your mother on mother's day or waiting until the last minute to file taxes. Maybe it's speeding or drinking one more beer than we really should have. Nothing that's going to throw us into a cement cell somewhere, but an act that we won't feel good about the next morning.

And it's usually something small that makes it worse. Something we didn't plan for.

I imagine we all have stories like that.