CBC reports on a vaction to the Dominican Republic ....

That's when … we both realized that this was getting out of control, that this was not just a misunderstanding," said Dawn Sinnott, who began yelling for help.

"You think you're in big trouble now?" Dawn Sinnott recalls a man identifying himself as an employee telling them. He then told them, she said, "You just disturbed the peace. I'm going to have you arrested.… You're going to prison forever."

Instead of a marked police vehicle, though, a white pickup truck arrived to take the Sinnotts away. They were taken to a building with cells, although they were later told the building is used by tourism security and not the actual police.

The Sinnotts said they were astonished when — at one point during the interrogation — the man who accused them of stealing his cellphone answered a cellphone he was carrying. The man said the cellphone he was using belonged to someone else.

"That's when it stopped being about the cellphone," Dawn Sinnott said.

"He said, 'If you just give us the money, you can go,'" Andrew Sinnott said. "I didn't have the [cash] — I didn't even have a room key."

The whole thing is worth a read and reminds me of my brother's friend who, upon graduation from medical school, headed to Mexico for vacation, which vacation ended when the police stuck a gun in his girlfriends face and made hime pay-up. They were going to charge him with some nonsense charge.

As my faithful reader would know, I am opposed to capital punishment. That opposition comes with qualifications. I am opposed to capital punishment in western civilizations where we have individual rights vs. the state. In a tyranny where the tyrant is playing the real game of power politics, things are a tad different. The tyrant uses whatever means -violence, death, torture, famine -to stay in power because when he is out of power he is going to face the same thing. It is a zero sum kind of game. In power, in exile or dead. Those are the choices. Saddam got his and now crying starts for a man who was not going to cry. He knew the game and he played it well and it ended as he knew it could. Would his death have been more acceptable if he was captured and killed by a mob after the fall of Iraq? Perhaps, but the world is rid of a bad guy. If alive, there was always the possiblity of a return to power.

 UPDATE: Of course Victor David Hansen has a view on this which is worth a read:

In Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, a "committee of sappy women" petition the governor to pardon the murderous Injun Joe. "If he had been Satan himself,” Twain snorts, “there would have been plenty of weaklings ready to scribble their names to a pardon petition, and drip a tear on it from their permanently impaired and leaky waterworks."

I thought of this passage as I read with disgust the international reaction to the hanging of Saddam Hussein. People who shrugged at Hussein’s torture, mutilation, murder, and genocide are now shocked, shocked that his victims sent him off to Hell with a few humiliating barbs. What do you expect? These are the people whose fathers and brothers were slaughtered by Hussein and his minions. It strikes me as the epitome of restraint that they just hanged him rather than paying him back in cruel kind.