From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon May 19 2003 - 14:13:53 MDT
--- Karen Rand Smigrodzki <karen@smigrodzki.org> wrote:
> Mike Lorrey wrote:
>
> > http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,958840,00.html
> >
> > The Guardian reports that there are a number of murders being
> committed
> > by individuals who either believe, or claim they believe, that they
> are
> > living in The Matrix. This is apparently a new sort of insanity
> > defense. If you believe that your victims are not real, are you
> > responsible for their deaths??
> >
>
> ^^^^^Do you mean legally responsible or factually responsible? Also,
> by "believe that your victims are not real" do you mean an insane
> delusion or a sane albeit irrational assumption or a sane, rational
> assumption which is nevertheless incorrect?
It was a rhetorical question, Karen, to illustrate what I expect to
become a new insanity defense. Since sociopaths are already recognised
as not regarding their victims as people, this treads on well
established areas of insanity defense case law. Whether there is any
distiction between your three different analyses, and which one is
accurate, apparently will be put to various juries.
Now, what remains to be determined is whether these individuals were
already sociopathic or pre-sociopathic, and were just triggered into
action by the movie, or whether they were driven to become sociopaths
by the memetic programming of the movie (assuming pshrinks determine
that the perps are in fact sociopathic), or whether they are just
opportunistic fakers.
=====
Mike Lorrey
"Live Free or Die, Death is not the Worst of Evils."
- Gen. John Stark
Blog: Sado-Mikeyism: http://mikeysoft.blogspot.com
Flight sims: http://www.x-plane.org/users/greendragon/
Pro-tech freedom discussion:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/exi-freedom
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