Life

An 18-year-old kidnapper has been given life in prison in Chihuahua, the first such sentence handed out in modern Mexico. The convict, Arturo Cruz, was arrested with two accomplices on November 26 with a kidnapped businessman in his custody. It's hard to have any sympathy for kidnappers, but given his age and the absence of a murder charge, Cruz seems like a bad guinea pig. It's also odd that Chihuahua's famously overstretched judicial system was able to go from arrest to life sentence in less than a month; it's almost as if some powerful new figure on the Chihuahua scene decided to make Cruz his scapegoat.