Michigan man accused of trying to 2 kidnap two girls allegedly flipped off their families in court: reports

A guy who allegedly tried to snatch two little girls off the street stood up in a Michigan courtroom and flipped off their families. Not on the way out, not in a hallway scuffle caught on a phone camera. In the courtroom, in front of a judge, while he was backing out of a plea deal on the charges. That's the story in one image, and it tells you almost everything about how little accountability actually registers with some people once they're standing in front of the system that's supposed to deliver it.

We keep hearing that the justice process is about dignity and restraint, that victims and families have to sit quietly through hearings, motions, delays, and now apparently gestures of contempt, because that's how the system works. Fine. But somebody explain to the families of those two girls why the man accused of trying to take their children gets to use his court appearance to taunt them, and why that's treated as a footnote in the coverage instead of the headline.

This is the same courthouse culture that treats a plea deal as a formality to be walked back on a whim, with no real cost to the defendant for wasting everyone's time or for the theatrics on the way out. Families who lived through the terror of an actual attempted kidnapping deserve a process that at minimum doesn't hand the accused a stage to mock them from.

None of this determines guilt. That's for a jury. But the disrespect on display here, mid-proceeding, aimed at the people who nearly lost their kids, is its own small window into how unserious our courts have become about protecting the people they're supposed to serve first.