A lot of you have questions about Elizabeth Smart. Why didn't she run? Why didn't she call out to the searchers who were so close at one point that she could hear their voices? Why didn't she do this? Why didn't she do that?
I have been in this TV news business close to 30 years now, and I have seen this story before.
Remember Steven Stayner? He was the boy who was kidnapped and kept in a mountain home in northern California seven years before he realized something was wrong and that he should walk into a police department.
Remeber Colleen Stan? She was abducted while hitchhiking and spent years as a so-called sex slave living in a box under her kidnaper's bed.
In both cases, the kidnaping victim had plenty of opportunity to use a phone, to leave the place they were being kept, to do something other than just sit there.
But they just sat there — in part because of fear, in part because of the brainwashing they were subjected to, in part because they were so isolated, they didn't think anybody cared or even knew they were missing.
In all my experience with cases like these, the defense attorney will always raise these questions to show that the victim could have escaped, but chose not to.
The defense always makes this a decision the victim made.
But you know what else? In all of these cases, I have seen the jury get it right and put the kidnaper in jail.
Elizabeth Smart is back. It's a very happy story. The goofball in the beard is going to be dressing in orange for a very, very long time.
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