Monday, February 1, 2010

Falsely Arrested?

Just a short post, I don't want to rant and rave. It gets tiring.

You've likely heard about the 10 Americans arrested in Haiti for trying to illegally take 33 "orphans" across the border to the Dominican Republic. You may have also heard that they belong to a church group.

If you go to the church's website the first thing you see is an update telling you that the group has been "falsely arrested".

The leader of the group stated to press that they didn't think they needed approval to take the children out of the country, they were just trying to help.

Regardless of whether or not their intentions were good or or not, they were correctly arrested for breaking the Haitian law. You cannot legally take any children across any national border without paperwork, even if it were simply Daija and I going for a say trip to Detroit. This is common sense. Also common sense: when you break the law (intentional or not) you get arrested.

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions" or something like that. Whether I intend to break the law or not doesn't change the fact that the law is broken. Some are blaming the religious aid groups as a whole, some are citing the arrogance of Americans in flouting laws in another country, many are pointing to ignorance and stupidity, some are balling them all up into a maelstrom of epic proportions but, like I said, I don't want to rant and rave. Just wanted to say, this was not a false arrest. False arrest is when you didn't do anything wrong - they definitely did.

3 comments:

Daddio said...

We humans are capable of some incredibly stupid things :s
If you did nothing wrong and got arrested - that's a false arrest. What do you call it when you do something wrong, and don't get arrested?

Eric said...

We are also capable of justifying some incredibly stupid things...

What do we call it when we do something wrong and don't get caught? Criminal-at-large, falsely free, living in sin ;) I don't know that we have a name for it.

Daddio said...

how about lucky?