https://www.omaha.com/opinion/editorial-vigilante-justice-is-wrong-omaha-sex-predators-killer-is-no-hero/article_7fa92eec-33ea-5f93-a08c-4330465ea6f5.html

No, we don’t take the law into our own hands and go kill people, even if they are demonstrably reprehensible human beings.

Nor do we burn churches that hold services in defiance of COVID-19 restrictions, as apparently happened last week in Mississippi.

That apparent arson fire demonstrates just one of the societal dangers involved when someone decides to enforce their interpretation of a law or public health order or just their sense of right and wrong. It is, literally, anarchy, and it puts us all at risk.

So the killing of twice-convicted sex offender Mattieo Condoluci this month in Omaha was wrong, notwithstanding that his own daughter says children are safer as a result and that she supports probation for the killer. By many accounts, Condoluci was a bad guy. We’re not standing up for him; we’re standing up for the law and for civil order.

James Fairbanks, a now-suspended Omaha Public Schools employee who had worked with troubled kids, told his ex-wife he killed Condoluci and, officials say, was the author of an email confessing to the killing. In that email, the writer said he happened upon Condoluci’s name on the state sex offender registry while he researched a neighborhood where he might want to live. The writer said he saw play equipment in Condoluci’s yard and saw him leering at children.

So he killed him.

If the email is a true account, this trial and execution was based on Condoluci’s convictions in 1994 and 2006, the only public record of sex charges against him.

While it is for sure creepy that play equipment was in his yard, including a slide and dilapidated playhouse, Douglas County records show that Condoluci didn’t own the home.

Sex abuse of a child is evil, leaving lasting pain. Perpetrators often don’t serve long in prison. Condoluci’s 1994 Florida victim died of a drug overdose in 2017, and the mother created a Facebook page calling out the predator. Now, she is raising money for Fairbanks’ offense, and some hail the purported killer as a hero.

He’s not.

Vengeance and the idea of applying instant justice are seductive, but can so easily go wrong. One person’s trigger might be child molestation — in fact, a handful of homicides have been documented in recent years in which sex offenders were targeted from state registries. Another’s might be drug dealing or a young man walking through a subdivision in a hoodie. Another’s might be a jogger going into a home that’s under construction to drink water, which may have preceded the shooting death earlier this year in Georgia of Ahmaud Arbery.

We cross an insidious line when we cheer or silently condone vigilantism, ignoring basic tenets of civilized society.

Fairbanks’ supporters would do well to turn their energy toward supporting victims and lobbying for laws that ensure adequate punishment rather than putting money in his jail commissary account and tacitly egging on other would-be killers.

We don’t live in a Hollywood drama. As a nation of laws, we reserve the death penalty, levied only after careful judicial consideration and layers of appeal, for only the most heinous taking of life. No one is justified in bypassing that process.