Remember the two pot smokers who spent so much time high that they thought it was a good idea to deny a toddler they were caring for any liquids for a week because the 23-month-old wet the bed, actions which lead to the child’s torturous death? You may have been outraged when one of those drug addled degenerates got probation for his role in the child’s death. Now the second one of these fiends has been sentenced and has drawn a measly five years for torturing a helpless toddler to death:

New Haven (WTNH) – A Hamden woman has been sentenced to five years in prison and five years probation in the dehydration death of a toddler. The baby’s mother was so distraught during today’s sentencing, she had to be removed from the courtroom.

Sharon Patterson plead guilty to criminally negligent homicide in the death of 23 month old Amari Jackson. Prosecutors say Patterson didn’t give the baby anything to drink for more than a week because he wet the bed.

Cameras were not allowed inside the courtroom, but News Channel’s Annie Rourke says that when Patterson tried to apologize, Amari’s mother began screaming and tried to lunge across the barrier before she was forcibly removed. By the time she walked out of the New Haven court, Sara Hicks had collected herself and did not want to speak to reporters.

Amari was just one month shy of his second birthday when he died in February 2008. Sara Hicks says she was so ill that she left her son at Patterson’s Putnam Avenue apartment in Hamden. But Patterson denied the boy to drink any fluids for at least a week.

“Part of the deprivation was that Sharon Patterson laced drinking glasses throughout the house with some form of hot sauce so Amari wouldn’t drink,” said Capt. Ronald Smith, Hamden Police Department.

In court today, Patterson’s defense attorney said his client is not a monster, rather she has diminished mental capacity. At her trial, her charge was reduced from manslaughter to negligent homicide. Experts testified that she has the decision-making ability of a six-year old.

Gee, how does a grown woman who isn’t suffering from retardation of some kind end up with the decision making ability of a six-year-old? Drug use? Nah. That just can’t have been a factor, right legalization proponents?

From the same hellish state, here’s a man who took part in a vicious drug-fueled 14 hour gang-rape of a woman and was sentenced to just three years in jail:

Stamford (AP) – A 26-year-old Connecticut man has been sentenced to three years in prison for his role in the gang rape of a New Canaan woman that took place over 14 hours in two towns.

Wilkens Placide of Norwalk was sentenced Wednesday in Stamford Superior Court. He pleaded guilty in March to third-degree sexual assault and other crimes. Placide was the last of four defendants sentenced in the sexual assault of the 24-year-old woman.

Police say the assaults occurred at three different houses in Stamford and Norwalk during a night of drug use in July 2007.

A second man, Catragne Moresca of Stamford, is serving a four-year prison sentence, and the other two men got two years in jail.

All four defendants said the woman willingly exchanged sex for drugs.

Sure she did. More likely she wanted to get high with some drug users and got gang raped for her trouble. But what do these stories have in common?

Drug users committing vicious crimes are getting off easy because the authorities aren’t making them responsible for their actions. If drugs were legal these crimes would have still been committed, and the perpetrators still would have gotten off easy. The unspoken truth of legalization is that part of the proponents’ vision of society includes ignoring crime like this, coddling the perpetrators and allowing rapists and murderers to claim diminished capacity. This is because drug use requires people to not take responsibility for their own actions, which is why sobriety only works when people take responsibility for themselves, their actions and the pain they cause others. If we legalize (or like liberal Connecticut, wink and nod at) drug use we must accept the drug users’ reality. That reality is based on the assumption that they are never ultimately responsible for the actions they take.

If we agree that drug use diminishes capacity, why would we want to make it easier and legal for people to spend all day getting high?

When someone tells you legalization would stop crime, remember little Amari Jackson, and that poor woman who spent 14 hours getting gang raped. That’s what the drug culture really looks like, and only teaching people the truth about drug abuse will ever end drug related crime.

h/t reader Kim who emailed me this story.