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Three murders, all involving mental questions

Back on October 20, an Iraqi man living in Arizona allegedly ran over his 20-year-old daughter with his car because she had become “too westernized.” She’s since died. I’ve talked about “honor killings” on the air in the past. Most of the time, I think these fathers are just raging control freaks who kill because they get angry that their daughters disobey them and then try to blame their behavior on religion after the fact. I believe there have, however, been some true “honor killings” in the U.S., which merely points out how insane it would be to allow, as some European countries have, disputes arising and crimes committed among members of immigrant families to be adjudicated under the families’ traditional religious laws rather than the secular law of this land. It doesn’t matter whether these guys think that their actions were “wrong.” If they’ve been smart enough to get themselves and their families to the United States, then I’d assume that their minds are working well enough to have known that their actions were “wrong” by this society’s standards (oh yeah, and he fled, too — first to Mexico, then to the U.K. before being sent back here by the British to face justice — looks like consciousness of guilt to me), and ours are the standards to which they must be held while they’re here.

A four-year-old California boy has been found dead in his neighbor’s clothes dryer, and the neighbor’s 14-year-old son has been arrested in connection with the apparent murder. Law enforcement reportedly believes that the older boy first drowned the younger boy and then stuffed the body into the dryer. There’s reportedly also a theory as to motive, but law enforcement hasn’t stated it publicly yet. This makes the second time in a week that I’ve written about horrific crimes committed by juveniles (the first was the California gang rape case). When these cases come up, I’m often asked how such young people could behave in such depraved ways unless they’re insane? I recently wrote an answer to that in my column “Cultural Chaos Compounding Crime”. I’m then often asked about whether the alleged perpetrators’ minds are developed enough to be held responsible for their crimes as adults. Several factors go into that determination, and you can see what they are in my post dated 5/1/09. When the crimes are as serious as the California gang rape and the murder of this little boy whose body was found in the dryer, I tend to think that even a very young person can reasonably be expected to have known what he or she was doing and that it was wrong, so I tend to come down in favor of adult charges more often than not. In any case, the death penalty will be off the table because the Supreme Court has ruled that it’s “cruel and unusual punishment” to execute convicts who were under the age of 18 at the times of their crimes. There’s more on that in my blog posts dated 3/8/07 and 8/9/07. Depending on what the Supreme Court does next year, there’s even a chance that life in prison without the possibility of parole could be off the table. There’s a case currently pending in which the Court will decide whether it was “cruel and unusual punishment” to have sentenced a 13-year-old to life without parole in Florida, and that case could have implications for this one. I generally don’t favor such “blanket” prohibitions, preferring to let the courts of the various states evaluate specific circumstances on a case-by-case basis. The case that led to the ban on executions of individuals who were under 18 at the times of their crimes involved a 17-year-old who committed a brutal murder and then bragged that he’d get away with it because he was a juvenile. He didn’t get away with it, but he didn’t get the death penalty either, and in his case, the death penalty would’ve been fine with me.

Finally tonight, remember Michelle Kehoe? She’s the Iowa mother who allegedly killed one of her children, thought she’d killed her other child, and then told law enforcement they’d been attacked by a stranger (the second child survived and told law enforcement that the assailant was in fact Kehoe herself). Well, her trial’s now underway in Iowa, and the defense is expected to be insanity.

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