I commend Dateline

So my TV is on as I'm laying on my bed typing this and the show Dateline: To Catch a Predator is on. I tell you what, I'm adding this one to a high priority on my DVR after watching an episode and a half.

They catch guys coming over to 12 to 15 year old girls (and sometimes boys) houses with condoms, beer, weed, etc and then tape the guy's reaction as they read back the IM conversation where the guy asks the teen if she wants to try anal sex or something. They read back one conversation that went like this:
[fake14yroldboy]: u wont tell any1 that im gay will u
[sickinternetpredator]: if u wont tell anyone u *****ed my ****

Then they get his reaction when they reveal that they have been filming him since he walked in. Finally, we get to see the guy jumped by the overly dramatic police as soon as the pervert goes out the front door. They even had a cop camouflaged in a hedge who would jump out and tackle the guy.

I have no idea how they get the guys to agree to be so incredibly publicly humiliated on nation TV. Highly entertaining. Definitely the first show on MSNBC I've ever added to my favorites list. Hmm, maybe that's a sign I'm growing up. Either that or it's a signal MSNBC is moving closer to the usual trashy MTV/VH1 reality shows that are my favorites.

At the conclusion of the show, they show the guy, his real name, location, and what has become of him. The swarmy looking foreign guy, not surprisingly, has a warrant out for his arrest. The rest all have received similar sentences, 5 to 7 years in prison plus 8-10 years of probation. Except one guy, who got 2 years but never served any time because the judge suspended his sentence. And that was the guy who drove 223 miles and literally walked into a house naked where he thought he was meeting a 13 year old!

So I guess the moral of the story is: not only is it sick as fuck for a person to actually meet children online with the intention of having sex with them, but you may have your life absolutely ruined on national TV. I commend D:TCAP for doing this. It's a great public service to put these kind of people behind jail. But as added lesson, if you have a lawyer as good as John Kennelly of Tampa, Florida did, you might be able to get away with not going to prison for half a decade. This, my friends, is the importance of lawyers.