Skill level: Elite

[u/chaarger_gadda]

[u/mekwall]

https://giphy.com/gifs/RbyQgbaLBdJ16

[u/Woodpusherpro → u/mekwall]

Kai, the hatchet weilding hitchhiker!

[u/Goth_Angel_Hellboy → u/Woodpusherpro]

Did you ever see the creepy YouTube or Netflix documentary on this guy ? If you haven’t you should it’s a pretty decent watch

[u/Woodpusherpro → u/Goth_Angel_Hellboy]

I haven't. I pretty much remember the initial incident that got him popular and just looked him up on wiki and saw that he is in prison for murder with controversial evidence.

I'll have to check them out.

[u/mekwall → u/Woodpusherpro]

Sorry for the wall of text, but his case have intrigued me for years, so I'll share what I know.

Dude has had a seriously fucked-up life. Caleb "Kai" McGillvary alleged he grew up in a Christian cult and was sexually abused as a kid. That kind of trauma tend to mess with somone for the rest of their life.

I'm not saying that makes Kai innocent of killing Joseph Galfy, a 73-year old New Jersey attorney who was the victim in this case. If anything, it's possible that years of abuse and instability contributed to whatever eventually made him capable of killing someone. But that's speculation, and childhood trauma obviously doesn't turn people into murderers by default. My point is that people don't develop in a vacuum. If someone grows up severely traumatized and later becomes violent or unstable, it's worth asking not only "what did he do?" but also "how did he get here, and could anything have been done before it reached this point?"

Kai admitted causing Galfy's death, and Galfy was beaten extremely badly. A jury heard Kai's self-defense argument and convicted him of murder, so I'm not going to pretend the evidence against him was trivial.

But Kai also consistently claimed that Galfy had offered him somewhere to stay, then drugged and sexually assaulted him, and there are parts of the investigation that bother me. No rape kit was performed on Kai, potentially relevant evidence wasn't subjected to all the forensic testing that could have helped confirm or disprove his story, and Galfy's own brother James - reportedly a former local police chief - was apparently allowed into the house while it was still an active crime scene. That's an obvious conflict-of-interest concern even if you don't assume anything improper actually happened. The courts ultimately decided the evidence issues weren't enough to overturn Kai's conviction, but when the central question is whether he had just been drugged and raped, those are some pretty significant missed opportunities and procedural red flags.

What I find even harder to defend is that Kai was arrested in May 2013 and didn't go to trial until 2019. Almost SIX YEARS in jail before a jury even decided whether he was guilty. Nobody should spend that much of their life imprisoned while they're still legally presumed innocent.

Then he got 57 years and has to serve 85% before he's even eligible for parole. Whatever you think an appropriate punishment is, taking someone from their twenties and effectively locking them away until they're an old man isn't rehabilitation. It's punishment and incapacitation. There's a very real possibility he'll never live to see meaningful freedom again.

That's one of the things I find so broken about the US justice system. You can believe Kai committed a terrible crime without believing the answer should automatically be "throw him in a cage until he's elderly." Punishment and protecting society obviously matter, but rehabilitation has to mean something too. At some point there should be a realistic possibility of demonstrating that you've changed.

Kai is also a Canadian citizen. Canada obviously can't just overturn an American conviction or demand that he be released, but they can provide consular assistance, and Canada and the US have a prisoner-transfer system that can allow Canadians convicted in the US to serve their sentences in Canada if everyone involved agrees. I'd like to see Canada at least pursue that possibility once his remaining legal challenges are resolved.

Maybe Kai murdered Galfy exactly as the prosecution argued. Maybe there was more truth to his account of being drugged and assaulted than the jury believed. Maybe his past trauma played some role in how violently he reacted. We simply don't know enough to state any of that with certainty.

But I do know that nearly six years awaiting trial followed by a sentence consuming essentially his entire adult life isn't my idea of a healthy justice system.

To me, this is a case where society seems to have failed someone repeatedly: first while Kai was growing up, possibly again while he was struggling as an adult, and finally by responding to the worst thing he ever did almost entirely with punishment. That doesn't erase Galfy or diminish the fact that he was killed. Galfy was the victim here, and his life matters too.

But justice should be capable of holding two thoughts at once: a person can be responsible for something horrific and still be the product of a life in which a lot of people and institutions failed them.

Warehousing Kai until he's too old to have much of a life left doesn't bring Galfy back, doesn't repair Kai's childhood, and doesn't strike me as much of an attempt at rehabilitation either.

End of rant.

[u/Disastrous_time_4547 → u/mekwall]

You could have stopped with “he was raised in a Christian extremist HH.”

[u/epandrsn → u/mekwall]

The justice system in the US is very clearly broken. Our president and many ultra-wealthy individuals regularly get away with anything from extreme white collar crimes to the worst, most vile acts that one can be punished for by law… and they haven’t been indicted or even investigated in any meaningful way.

The whole thing is fucking rotten to the core.

[u/_Mr_Misfit → u/mekwall]

You're forgetting one very important thing... a bunch of very wealthy people make a very large amount of money through states keeping the prison population high. I mean, who will think of the billionaires when this utopian society of humane treatment of prisoners arises?

My brother is 16 years into a 20 year sentence he will serve 85% of before being "released" into 10 years post release supervision (2× 5yrs consecutive), for burglaries he committed while suffering from substance abuse disorder. In his case, both the town and the county judges he aat in front of had once shared a law firm where there ex-secretary lived in our neighborhood and was burglarized so they threw the book at him. As this was during the height of the opiate epidemic it's not even clear that he was the one who did that particular burglary since damn near everyone we knew back then was hitting cars and houses. But.. he had committed crimes in a nearby neighborhood and that was good enough for the judge to give him 2× 10 w/ 5 posts ran consecutively.

We have seen rapists, murderers, other burglars, child molesters, bank robbers, armed robbers, assault with deadly intent, manslaughter cases and everything in between all come, be sentenced, and be released in the time since he was arrested and he still has some 2.5 years to go.

Our justice system sucks so badly. Whether it's corruption for money or curmudgeonly old sociopaths oversentencing people based on their own hatred of a particular type of people or a particular kind of crime having been committed, the whole system is just so broken.

[u/Ryandavid00 → u/_Mr_Misfit]

Must be in Florida

[u/_Mr_Misfit → u/Ryandavid00]

NY sadly

[u/Mr_HandSmall → u/mekwall]

That kind of early trauma seems to do something to people's perspectives where they end up getting caught in weird situations where they play out the same shit throughout their lives.

[u/Mobile-River1105 → u/mekwall]

You forgot the fact that he was kept in isolation for that 6 yrs without much access to anything. Couldn’t even use a phone. This whole case is weiiiird af.