A 43-year-old man, Jason Vukovich was sentenced to 23 years in prison, in February of 2018, for numerous assault and robbery charges. However, many people believe that Vukovich is actually a vigilante hero because all of his victims were pedophiles.

At one time, Vukovich called himself an “avenging angel seeking justice,” but has since shown regret for his crimes. Vukovich will be eligible to apply for parole once he’s served six years of his sentence.

It was revealed in court that Vukovich was a victim of abuse himself. In his testimony, he said that he was sexually and physically abused by his stepfather as a child. Vukovich now says that the rampage of revenge was not worth it. He now says that he takes “full responsibility for his actions.”

According to the charges, Vukovich found three different men through his state’s online sex offender registry list. This rampage took place during five days of violence in June of 2016. Vukovich reportedly knocked one of the targets unconscious by hitting him in the head with a hammer. He also robbed the man, going so far as to steal his laptop and his truck.

Photo Credit: ADN

Prosecutors say that Vukovich had a notebook that contained a hit list with the names of pedophile targets, including his victims, Charles Albee, Andres Barbosa, and Wesley Demarest.

Superior Court Judge Erin Marston told him during his sentencing that “vigilantism is not something that we accept in America.”

Marston pointed out that the men who were hunted down and attacked in this case may have been guilty of terrible crimes, but they had already paid their debts to society and were required by law to keep their names on the registry.

In exchange for his guilty plea, prosecutors decided to drop over a dozen charges. In a five page letter to Anchorage Daily News, Vukovich made an emotional plea for other people to not turn to violence as he has.

“If you have already lost your youth, like me, due to a child abuser, please do not throw away your present and your future by committing acts of violence. There is no place for vigilante justice in an ordered society. I thought back to my experiences as a child and felt the overwhelming desire to act. I took matters into my own hands and assaulted three pedophiles,” Vukovich said in his letter.

“I began my life sentence many, many years ago, it was handed down to me by an ignorant, hateful, poor substitute for a father. I now face losing most of the rest of my life due to a decision to lash out at people like him. To all those who have suffered like I have, love yourself and those around you, this is truly the only way forward.” the letter added.

In another interview, Vukovich insisted that he was not proud of his actions, and does not want to be celebrated.

“I’m far from perfect — a flawed and imperfect individual like everyone else. However, it’s important to me that someone else who was born and raised in Alaska who had a similar upbringing doesn’t end up with this outcome because quite candidly, it sucks,” he said in an interview with the newspaper.

As it stands, Vukovich was sentenced to 28 years in 2018, five of which have been suspended.

Ember Tilton, Vukovich’s attorney, says that he is a person who needs psychological treatment, not prison.

“I don’t think he needs to be punished. He’s already been punished. This whole thing started out as the punishment of a child who didn’t deserve to be treated in that way,” Tilton said.

Criminals do not take kindly to pedophiles, who are often targets for vigilantes, especially in prison. Last week, we reported that a notorious pedophile faced street justice while behind bars at a prison in Milan, Michigan. 40-year-old Christian Maire was sentenced to 40 years in prison for running a child exploitation and pornography ring.

However, the inmates at the prison decided that death was the proper penalty for his crimes. The medical examiner determined that Maire died of multiple stab wounds and blunt force trauma to the head. The incident is being investigated as a homicide, but no suspects in the case have been announced.

It is true that society would get very messy if everyone took justice into their own hands. However, the actions that some of these vigilantes take are understandable, considering that the law often lets these predators fall through the cracks.

In another recent story we reported on, a pedophile in the UK managed to avoid jail time after the third time of getting caught with a large stockpile of child abuse images and videos. On the final time he was caught, there were over a million files on his hard drive.

A Filmmaker by the name of Lalange Snow shot a photo series that captures how different a person looks before, during and after going to war. Snow photographed and interviewed 14 members of 1st Battalion from The Royal Regiment of Scotland multiple times through their process of going to war in Afghanistan. Close up photos were taken of the soldiers faces just before they left for duty, as well as three months after deployment while they were in the middle of the war, and then again one final time days after they came back home from battle.

Snow’s series is called “We Are The Not D-ead,” and the purpose of the project was to show the physical and psychological toll that war takes on a person, just by showing their face at different stages in the journey.

A similar theme is echoed through many of the photos, with the enlistees appearing somewhat timid and nervous. The photos showing the soldiers in the midst of war are very cold and serious when compared with the others, while the final photos show a mixture of relief and regret.

The photos can be seen below:

Interviews with the soldiers in the photo series showed that they lived through some very terrible things, and many of them had regrets about their time in the military. It is extremely common for soldiers to come back from war with P-TSD, a psychological condition that affects people who are exposed to extreme and violent situations. In the case of the soldiers interviewed for this project, many of them came back home and struggled with mental health and readjusting to life as a civilian.

In the interviews, the soldiers also expressed doubt in their mission, and sympathy for many of the people who they killed in the line of duty. Many of them said that they don’t even know what they were fighting for or why they were there, halfway around the world. This sentiment is common among many veterans, who saw the carnage and senselessness of war up close and personal.

The United States and allied NATO countries have been at war in Afghanistan since October 7th, 2001.

There have been unconfirmed rumors that the Trump administration was planning to pull out of the Afghanistan war, but many of his advisors are warning strongly against it.

In early September, nine former senior U.S. diplomats issued a press release through the website of the military-linked think tank The Atlantic Council, urging the Trump administration to stay in Afganistan to prevent the current civil war from spiraling out of control, NBC reported. The press release warned that pulling the United States military out of the region could have a catastrophic impact on the entire middle east and allow ISIS to develop a stronghold.

The rumors of a possible troop pullout came from US presidential envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, who claimed that the United States and the Taliban had come to an agreement about the withdrawal of 5,000 American troops within 135 days. The envoy said that the agreement was simply awaiting the approval of US President Donald Trump.

In case you missed it: In 1984, a man named Gary Plauché killed a pedophile who kidnapped and raped his son, Jody. Considering the circumstances, the judge and jury showed leniency with Plauché and he was given a seven-year suspended sentence with five years of probation and 300 hours of community service, and he ended up serving no time in jail. The case was extremely controversial at the time, with many people arguing whether or not it was justifiable for Plauché to take matters into his own hands.

Plauché and his son Jody lived in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. When Jody was 11-years-old, between 1983 and 1984, he began taking karate lessons with a 25-year-old instructor named Jeffrey Doucet. At some point in their time together, Doucet began molesting the young boy. The abuse lasted for about a year until Doucet kidnapped Jody and took him to a motel in California in February of 1984. Police eventually caught up with the Doucet after he allowed Jody to make a phone call from the hotel to call his family.

On March 16th, 1984, Doucet was flown to Baton Rouge Metropolitan Airport to prepare for his trial. Doucet was still in police custody and after he landed in Baton Rouge, he was led through the airport in handcuffs by a team of police. Plauché was waiting for Doucet with a gun in the airport, after getting a tip from a local news reporter about the flight schedule.

Plauché was waiting in the airport terminal near television crews and speaking on a payphone as all of the reporters were waiting for the kidnapper to land. He was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses so no one would recognize him and prevent him from carrying out his mission.

As soon as Plauché saw Doucet, he took out his gun and fired a single shot, directly at the right side of Doucet’s head. In videos of the incident, Plauché can be seen firing the shot before he is restrained by officers who removed the gun from his hand and arrested him. Many of the police on the scene instantly recognized the shooter as the victim’s father and can be heard asking “Gary, why? Why, Gary?”

Doucet was taken to the hospital but died the next day from his injuries.

Plauché was initially charged with second-degree murder, but agreed to a plea bargain in which he pleaded no contest to manslaughter. He received a seven-year suspended sentence, with five years of probation and 300 hours of community service, which he completed in 1989. He ended up spending no serious time in jail aside from his initial time served. Plauché’s defense team argued that he was driven to a temporarily psychotic state after learning of the abuse of his son.

In August 2019, Jody Plauché released his book “Why, Gary, Why?”: The Jody Plauché Story, which details the case from his perspective. Gary Plauché suffered a stroke in 2011 and passed away in 2014 at a nursing home after another stroke, at the age of 68.

What do you think? Did Plauché do the right thing? Should he have spent time in prison?