I was going to let this slide, but I simply can't ignore it. You are stupid. You are stupid, and you exhibit a viewpoint that is so fundamentally incorrect and so fundamentally dangerous to a just society that every single lawyer, every single judge and every single jurisprudence expert and legal theorist on the planet would condemn you for even thinking such a thing.
Humans have human rights, regardless of the crimes they commit. One of those rights is the right to a free and fair trial. If you disagree with this, you are stupid. You are inhumane.
Furthermore, justice must be delivered in an even handed manner. Justice is supposed to be blind. Think about all the thousands of other paedophiles in existence. There are police officers out there who catch hundreds of them in a year. This is not an isolated case; this is not a matter of Chris Hansen's "bait houses" being the only target of paedophiles out there. What happens to the other paedophiles? They do not get sentenced in the court of public opinion. They do not have their lives destroyed on camera. These people, although they are committing the exact same crime, are being punished differently simply on the basis of which house they randomly ended up going to. This is fundamentally unjust. If you disagree with this, you are stupid. If you disagree with this, you are inhumane.
Next up, human beings have a right to presumption of innocence. Until the facts of a case can be fully and completely analysed by a jury of their peers in context, judgement cannot be passed by anyone, especially by you, who is not a judge. To assume that because somebody has appeared on a programme that they are guilty and deserve to have their lives destroyed works externally to the socially mandated justice system and therefore degrades the human right to presumption of innocence. If you disagree with this, you are stupid and inhumane.
My arguments are completely and totally correct, and remain so with or without any insults to you. I'm insulting you as I argue because you deserve to be insulted and because my arguments do not have their validity tied to the words I choose to use when describing you.
Recording what happened and publishing it online and over the air is taking someone's picture and posting it with their name for the world to see. You are intentionally interfering with the normal context of law enforcement and shoehorning in an audience of millions into a critical stage of the evidence gathering process. You selectively view an incriminating moment external of context and pass judgement before a judgement can even legally be reached. The social penalties derived from such treatment far outweigh the proper legal penalties for sexually deviant behaviour and as such the defendants have a human right to have their identity obscured.
Justice systems work by prescribing remedies for breaches of the law in order to make victims whole again- whether that involves reparations being paid, rehabilitative methods being undertaken, or punitive decisions. Once you put these people on camera, once you decide to show their faces, you lose any and all hope of successful reintegration of offenders. You destroy their lives. You drastically increase incidence of depression and suicidality; all before they have even had a trial.
The fact that you defend these practices makes you stupid. The fact that you defend these practices makes you fundamentally inhumane. If people like you are not told exactly and precisely all the ways in which you are stupid and inhumane, society loses. Mob justice and irrational, emotive thinking and inequal, unjust punishments for the accused are a fast track to chaos and degradation of human rights.
If this has not changed your viewpoint, you are an enemy of human rights.
EDIT: I am hijacking the popularity of this comment to politely ask that Chris Hansen respond to my original question regarding journalistic ethics- and to ask the moderators of AMA to contact him again, or to justify the implicit support given to this programme by their hosting of this thread.