Abducted women found in Ohio decade later

[Mr. Morden]

Am I alone in finding Ariel Castro to be far more monstrous than Dzhokhar Tsarnaev?  Don't get me wrong.  Killing people indiscriminately like the Tsarnaev brothers did is horrific.  And I'd rather be imprisoned for 10 years than dead.  But still, the length of time that Castro (assuming he's guilty) held these women (who were kids when he first kidnapped them), without ever having mercy on them and setting them free, looking into his victims' eyes every day or every week or whatever and continuing on....it boggles the mind.  And one would have to assume that he did it all for purely selfish reasons, and not in the name of Afghans or Iraqis or whatever s*^t the Tsarnaevs presumably believed.

[Mr. Morden]

Question for the lawyer types here: Do the laws on kidnapping tend to distinguish much based on time that you've held someone?  So if you hold someone for 10 years, is the punishment significantly worse than if you hold someone for 10 weeks?  Seems like the former is significantly more horrific than the latter, so I'd think that the law *should* treat them differently, but my instinct is to doubt that lawmakers are smart enough to make such distinctions.  If it were up to me, penalty for kidnapping someone and holding them for ten years would be about the same as the penalty for murder.

(OTOH, maybe the penaly for kidnapping at all is already close to a life sentence, in which case, there's not much further you can go anyway?)

[Mr. Morden]

One guy kept control of all three women and his brothers had no idea this was happening?

That's what it looks like, yes.

He apparently kept them all in separate locked rooms for the first several years, and only allowed them to mingle with each other somewhat a bit more recently, once he'd established that they were too terrified to try to escape.  He apparently used to test them by claiming that he was going out and telling them not to move until he got back, but then coming back a short time later, and beating them if they'd moved.  So yeah, he basically made them think that escape was hopeless, and that if they tried to escape and failed, they'd suffer greatly.