>>112314686Intent is important. Here, the theft can't be lauded unless we know what the thief's intentions are and whether or not he consciously chose to rob someone everyone hates like a rapist. Did he know it was a rapist? Did he know but not care? Did he steal from the rapist as a form of exacting justice, or did he steal from the rapist knowing that nobody would defend a rapist, and thus most likely get a lighter sentence, or at least some public support? That's not the main point though. As far as I see it, a thief is a thief, a person who expends effort to forcefully take someone else's belongings. All in all, an unjust act.
But he robbed a rapist. And how does that balance out? Is being robbed worse than being raped? In the former case, while some psychological trauma is to be expected, most things that are stolen can be replaced or at least compensated for (bar things like family photos). Rape, however, is physically and especially mentally very harmful, and received trauma can take years to overcome. To me, it's comparable to a murderer getting his leg broken. It doesn't balance out, and I don't feel sorry for the rapist.
We probably know the rapist is a rapist because he got convicted for being one, meaning that, if our justice system is to be trusted, he already got punished for his crime. Therefore, I don't see the theft as being some justice, regardless of the intent of the thief, and I can say it does objectively suck for the guy to be robbed, but still I would not feel bad about it.
Getting to sympathy: "deserve" is the wrong word to use because sympathy isn't a 100% rational and calculated emotion. No emotion is. Nobody "deserves" sympathy, second of all. It's something people unconsciously feel. There is no sympathy police knocking on people's doors to collect owed sympathy. That aside, I can guarantee that a very low percentage, if anyone at all, would sympathize with the rapist in this case, ignoring all extraneous factors, "deserving" or not.
