Post by SoulTrainOz on Jul 16, 2006 8:04:30 GMT -5
By Jim Castagnera, Delaware County News
Comedian Flip Wilson used to dress up like a sexy lady, Geraldine, whose excuse for everything was, "The devil made me do it." Although Flip kept his date with the devil in 1998, the phrase has passed into the American lexicon. No wonder... the devil has been blamed for our misdeeds since Genesis.
When the Big G bopped into the Garden of Eden and asked Adam who gave him the apple, Adam pointed to Eve. Looking around the clearing for somebody else she could finger, the world's First Lady said, "The serpent deceived me and I ate."
Snakes have been paying the price as road kill ever since.
Starting with Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), psychologists and psychiatrists shifted the blame from Old Beelzebub to our own unconscious minds. America's most famous trial attorney, Clarence Darrow, imported their ideas into the criminal courtroom. In the 1924 trial of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, Darrow saved these young thrill-killers from hanging by arguing, "How insane they are I care not, whether medically or legally. They did not reason; they could not reason; they committed the most foolish, most unprovoked, most purposeless, most causeless act that any two boys ever committed, and they put themselves where the rope is dangling above their heads.... Why did they kill little Bobby Franks? Not for money, not for spite; not for hate. They killed him as they might kill a spider or a fly, for the experience. They killed him because they were made that way. Because somewhere in the infinite processes that go to the making up of the boy or the man something slipped, and those unfortunate lads sit here hated, despised, outcasts, with the community shouting for their blood."
Darrow opened the flood gates. The abuse excuse has become enshrined in American criminal law. Just as old Clarence presented evidence that his clients were the victims of naughty nannies and cold parents, Zacarias Mousaoui's defense team recently saved him from a lethal injection by winning his jury's sympathy with tales of an abusive daddy, thingyens-like orphanages and French mistreatment of Muslims. Writes Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, "The most poignant story to emerge is that of Moussaoui's longtime high-school girlfriend, whose parents mistreated Moussaoui because they considered him 'a dirty Arab.' Moussaoui was also deeply shaken, according to a former friend, when racist bouncers refused him entry into nightclubs. These injustices, coupled with his poverty and proximity to violence, radicalized and destabilized the young Moussaoui, ultimately turning him into an al-Qaida terrorist."
Continues Dershowitz, "The trouble with this tactic is that, if the jurors think about it, they will realize that it doesn't make much logical sense. Lots of people of Middle Eastern and North African descent grew up in France. Lots were raised in poverty. Many faced racial or religious discrimination, or otherwise experienced difficult childhoods of some sort of another. But only a tiny minority of those who experienced those conditions, and sometimes much worse, grew up to participate in conspiracies to murder thousands of people by terrorism."
Dershowitz, who decried the abuse excuse in an earlier book, and all you parents who feel guilty about possibly scarring your children for life, won't have to worry for long. According to a recent New York Times story, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle just took all us agonized parents off the hook. Scientists there claim to have linked risk-taking in mice with a gene.
I'm not sure what sort of risk- taking these docs observed. Did a mouse with the suspect DNA walk up and poke a cat in the nose? Did he engage in date rape with the girl mice in his cage? Did he bully all the other boys into giving him their mouse pellets? The article doesn't elaborate. No matter... whatever he did, you can be sure his DNA made him do it.
Up until now, DNA testing has been a real blessing to criminal justice. The guilty have been connected to their otherwise-perfect crimes, while innocent men on death row have been cleared and released. This new notion, however, has scary implications.
Imagine the courtroom scene in which the prosecution proves that the defendant committed the crime --- perhaps rape or murder --- beyond a reasonable doubt. Then defense counsel puts a biologist on the stand, who says, well, yes, the defendant did it... but only because he's been cursed with the deadly DNA. "It was in his blood. He couldn't help but do it."
We used to say, "The devil is in the details." I guess from now on the phrase must be, "The devil is in the DNA."
Source : Delaware County News (Jim Castagnera is an attorney and a journalist who lives and writes in Havertown)
www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?BRD=1725&dept_id=45406&newsid=16918741&PA
Comedian Flip Wilson used to dress up like a sexy lady, Geraldine, whose excuse for everything was, "The devil made me do it." Although Flip kept his date with the devil in 1998, the phrase has passed into the American lexicon. No wonder... the devil has been blamed for our misdeeds since Genesis.
When the Big G bopped into the Garden of Eden and asked Adam who gave him the apple, Adam pointed to Eve. Looking around the clearing for somebody else she could finger, the world's First Lady said, "The serpent deceived me and I ate."
Snakes have been paying the price as road kill ever since.
Starting with Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), psychologists and psychiatrists shifted the blame from Old Beelzebub to our own unconscious minds. America's most famous trial attorney, Clarence Darrow, imported their ideas into the criminal courtroom. In the 1924 trial of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, Darrow saved these young thrill-killers from hanging by arguing, "How insane they are I care not, whether medically or legally. They did not reason; they could not reason; they committed the most foolish, most unprovoked, most purposeless, most causeless act that any two boys ever committed, and they put themselves where the rope is dangling above their heads.... Why did they kill little Bobby Franks? Not for money, not for spite; not for hate. They killed him as they might kill a spider or a fly, for the experience. They killed him because they were made that way. Because somewhere in the infinite processes that go to the making up of the boy or the man something slipped, and those unfortunate lads sit here hated, despised, outcasts, with the community shouting for their blood."
Darrow opened the flood gates. The abuse excuse has become enshrined in American criminal law. Just as old Clarence presented evidence that his clients were the victims of naughty nannies and cold parents, Zacarias Mousaoui's defense team recently saved him from a lethal injection by winning his jury's sympathy with tales of an abusive daddy, thingyens-like orphanages and French mistreatment of Muslims. Writes Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, "The most poignant story to emerge is that of Moussaoui's longtime high-school girlfriend, whose parents mistreated Moussaoui because they considered him 'a dirty Arab.' Moussaoui was also deeply shaken, according to a former friend, when racist bouncers refused him entry into nightclubs. These injustices, coupled with his poverty and proximity to violence, radicalized and destabilized the young Moussaoui, ultimately turning him into an al-Qaida terrorist."
Continues Dershowitz, "The trouble with this tactic is that, if the jurors think about it, they will realize that it doesn't make much logical sense. Lots of people of Middle Eastern and North African descent grew up in France. Lots were raised in poverty. Many faced racial or religious discrimination, or otherwise experienced difficult childhoods of some sort of another. But only a tiny minority of those who experienced those conditions, and sometimes much worse, grew up to participate in conspiracies to murder thousands of people by terrorism."
Dershowitz, who decried the abuse excuse in an earlier book, and all you parents who feel guilty about possibly scarring your children for life, won't have to worry for long. According to a recent New York Times story, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle just took all us agonized parents off the hook. Scientists there claim to have linked risk-taking in mice with a gene.
I'm not sure what sort of risk- taking these docs observed. Did a mouse with the suspect DNA walk up and poke a cat in the nose? Did he engage in date rape with the girl mice in his cage? Did he bully all the other boys into giving him their mouse pellets? The article doesn't elaborate. No matter... whatever he did, you can be sure his DNA made him do it.
Up until now, DNA testing has been a real blessing to criminal justice. The guilty have been connected to their otherwise-perfect crimes, while innocent men on death row have been cleared and released. This new notion, however, has scary implications.
Imagine the courtroom scene in which the prosecution proves that the defendant committed the crime --- perhaps rape or murder --- beyond a reasonable doubt. Then defense counsel puts a biologist on the stand, who says, well, yes, the defendant did it... but only because he's been cursed with the deadly DNA. "It was in his blood. He couldn't help but do it."
We used to say, "The devil is in the details." I guess from now on the phrase must be, "The devil is in the DNA."
Source : Delaware County News (Jim Castagnera is an attorney and a journalist who lives and writes in Havertown)
www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?BRD=1725&dept_id=45406&newsid=16918741&PA