AS defense to murder fails

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Please don't tell me someone seriously used that excuse for murder.
ugh I hate the world

The scared rabbits out there that sentenced this person to be buried alive because they are afraid he might be let out some day and kill them personally shows the world what cowards live there. The truth of the matter is that this person was disturbed, was child-like, was in a fantasy world, and those who were supposed to be trusted with the care and development of this minor failed. So let's just bury him alive. The real threat comes from people who are scared of their own shadow because of crime reports making them believe that there are murderers ready to shoot them at every street corner.

You'd think that the issue of being mentally incompetent might have a bearing on the issue of guilty mind but naturally in this barbarous jurisdiction it doesn't, they make it seem as if he was fully competent and planned this, premeditated it, first degree murder, bury him alive. The same idiotic place that puts people in prison for life because the police shoot someone during a robbery! And to think that they lecture people about human rights.

Funny how they bring up his talk of a "perfect murder" in a forensics class as proof of premeditation. Sure, stabbing someone in the toilets sounds to me like a "perfect murder". No one would ever suspect a thing!

Xenon, you do realize that had the insanity defense worked, he would have been sent to a mental institution instead of prison? They stay there until they're "deemed safe to return to society", which is after a period that's on average twice as long as the jail sentence would have been.

I don't really see the point of that rant at all.

The real tragedy is that this could have been prevented. What ever happened to metal detectors in highschools? After Columbine, every highschool was supposed to have a metal detector. This is exactly the sort of thing that justifies highschool metal detectors.

Is it not then possible to believe you know right from wrong, but in fact be mistaken?

IMO it is quite possible to create a belief system with a given level of "right" and "wrong" and for it to NOT match up with the legal system.

Some crimes touch deeply, and killing people in the bathroom is so deep it was the premiss in the movie Psycho.

Jerry Sienfeld had a show about a book that had been in the bathroom, he could not get rid of it, and it seemed, everyone knew.

This crime ranks with snakes in the toilet.

Aspergers should have never been mentioned by the defense, for you know, Special Interests.

That opens him up to being questioned about how many bathrooms he had been in.

An innocent 15 year old was murdered, under the law he was tried as an adult, and the law says life with no parole for first degree murder.

It does not matter if he was 16, 17, 18, or 33, he killed a stranger in a bathroom.

He killed a child at school, in the bathroom, he brought a knife from home, there can be no other verdict.

That child had parents, grandparents, maybe siblings, and none of their lives will ever be the same.

The child had friends, classmates, teachers, and they will never forget.

For years to come children at school will have to use the bathroom.

I find this line of thought far more frightening than the specter of school violence, which remains incredibly rare.

Yes, a psychosis called "being a human being".

You seem not to realize that human beings who are sane, rational, and know exactly what they are doing are nevertheless capable of committing murder. It may be a comforting idea that murderers are psychotic; but the fact is that they are not psychotic any more often than non-murderers are.

We're going to have to face the reality of the human capacity for cruelty sooner or later; and calling it "insanity" just doesn't hold any water. Insane people aren't any more likely to murder than sane ones; and that means murder isn't "insane", "psychotic", or any other thing related to mental illness. If there's any adjective that describes it, it's simply "human nature". Assuming that murderers are insane may give you a nice comforting security blanket that says, "I can never do anything like that; humans don't do things like that; humans are basically good (or at least basically neutral); therefore murder is unnatural and must result from some sort of insanity"... But that's not true, and we can't stay in denial forever.

As somebody with both AS and ADHD, I have to say that the later would probably have been a better point in his defence.

mmm there is the stigma. If a character in a movie is manic and kills someone they say he is "psychotic" but that is not the correct use of the word...

There is a article
follow-up article in the news lately, an interview with his parents. Odgren had other problems besides AS and his parents had tried to get him into various services/schools. Besides being upset about the murder, I was dismayed, of course, by the negative publicitiy this may all cause-- I was relieved and amazed that when I told my parents the name of this condition I had discovered i had, that they hadn't already heard of it from this case! I had expected them to be horrified, if they had.