There’s no justice in paedophile Michael Guider’s release
If anyone deserves to spend their life behind bars it’s convicted serial paedophile Michael Guider. So why is he being released back into society and into the path of more unsuspecting children, asks Miranda Devine.
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You can’t blame Judge Richard Button, because his hands were tied by the law, but paedophile Michael Guider is such a danger to children he should never have been released.
After being convicted of drugging, sexually assaulting and killing nine-year-old Samantha Knight, as well as molesting at least another dozen children, he should be in jail for the rest of his natural life.
He has never shown any remorse and has never divulged the whereabouts of Samantha’s body. That alone should be grounds to keep him locked up.
Paedophiles like him can never be cured.
Judge Button, who describes him still as a “High Risk Offender” said he couldn’t determine that Guider — who drew pictures of children while behind bars — would ever give up his sexual attraction to children.
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Each of the psychiatric experts called to testify about Guider’s state of mind “has sounded significant notes of caution about the defendant”.
Forensic psychiatrist Jonathon Adams believed Guider still posed a “high risk of future sexual offending, and a moderate risk of future violent offending”, and still would feel sexual urges when near children, said Judge Button.
Even the pervert’s own brother, Tim Guider, wants him kept in prison because he’s a “monster and he’s a danger and the community don’t want him out … This is no normal person.”
Another of Guider’s victims, Lisa Giles, knows that all too well.
“Hold your children close,” she warned after the ruling yesterday to release Guider this week. “He will reoffend.”
In her victim impact statement to the NSW Supreme Court last month Giles said: “We are not physically safe if he is released — our children are not safe and our minds are not safe. This is not a man who will fade into obscurity and potter humbly around his garden … He’s not finished yet.”
Something is very wrong with our legal system that we can’t heed the warnings of psychiatric experts, judges, family members and victims.
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If incarceration is primarily to keep the community safe, there is no better example of when it is needed.
It is hard to imagine a monster like Guider being released in other countries. In the United States, child sex offenders with equivalent crimes have been sentenced to hundreds of years in jail to ensure they never are released.
Less than six months ago, a judge sentenced 45-year-old paedophile Thomas Goodman to 260 years in jail for violently molesting a three-week-old baby and two young girls and posting videos of the abuse on the internet.
When pronouncing sentence, US District Court Judge John McConnell said his most important obligation was to protect the public and ensure that Goodman could never again harm the victims.
“The only way I can do that is to be sure you never get out of prison again … I have no assurances you will stop.”
What’s the difference with Guider?
Two years ago, another American paedophile, Ronald Yarber, was jailed for a 1,652 years for raping a disabled child over the course of twelve years.
The record was 1870 years in jail for Thomas Halliday, convicted in 2013 of 234 counts of sexual abuse of a teenage girl over four years and filming the attacks.
In Guider’s case, he had already been convicted of dozens of paedophilia offences against at least 11 children before he was sentenced to 17 years for the unlawful homicide and sexual assault of Samantha. If the sentences had been added together, or cumulative, he would have spent more than 40 years in jail, and probably would have died behind bars.
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But, as it is, he has only served 23 years, because the sentences were concurrent, meaning they overlapped. This is madness. Why should you get an effective discount because you’ve committed more crimes?
We should be prepared to lock up for life proven homicidal predatory serial paedophiles like Guider who continue to pose a threat to children. Throw away the key. It’s the job of politicians to re-make the law.
Until then chemical castration should be a mandatory condition of release for sickos like Guider to minimise their chance of reoffending.
That’s what happens to child sex offenders around the world, from Ukraine and the Czech Republic to Indonesia.
In 2017 the NSW government introduced a chemical castration regime for paedophiles, against the objections of the Greens. But the catch is, it’s voluntary.
Judge Button said Guider has “expressed his readiness to take such medication, so long as it is physically safe for him to do so.”
But the Crown Prosecutor reportedly had said earlier in the case that Guider had declined to take the chemical castration drugs because they might interfere with his heart medication.
Frankly, who cares?
It is small comfort, as Samantha’s furious mother Tess said yesterday, that Guider will be closely monitored for the next five years and forced to wear electronic monitoring equipment.
But what happens after five years?
Guider is 68. He could have another couple of decades ahead to wait for an unsuspecting child to wander into his web. Paedophiles are nothing if not patient.
So it’s not good enough to say, as Judge Button does, that the “ageing process” will reduce his sick sex drive.
At the very least, Guider needs to be chemically castrated and electronically monitored until the day he dies, which can’t come soon enough.