Weekend Update
A jury in Italy found Amanda Knox guilty on Friday, and she’s been sentenced to over 27 years in an Italian prison. There’s been a lot of talk in the media this weekend about the circumstantial nature of some evidence in the case, but I’ll bet that the jury was right, and here’s what sealed it for me — how she reportedly lied immediately following her arrest and implicated a totally-innocent guy who, luckily for him, turned out to have an air-tight alibi. To me, that willingness to implicate an innocent person to save one’s own ass from a murder charge is consistent with capability of the crimes for which Knox has been convicted.
Also on Friday, a Michigan woman (I can’t bring myself to call her a “mother”) was allowed to plead “no contest” to a charge of involuntary manslaughter for starving her ten-year-old adopted quadriplegic daughter to death. She apparently deprived the girl of fluids that were supposed to have been administered through a feeding tube. The plea bargain allowed the woman to avoid the more serious charge of second-degree murder. Ok, but here’s what I don’t understand about this case. Both second-degree murder and manslaughter charges are appropriate only when the person committing the crime didn’t premeditate it. This murder — and that’s what I think it was — must’ve taken a while, and it seems to me that the woman must’ve thought about it over and over again as the poor child wasted away. Why a prosecutor and judge would agree to pretend like it was an unplanned, spur-of-the-moment act is beyond me. The woman now faces a maximum of 15 years in prison but is likely to get less than half of that. Sounds like the Italians are doing a better job of administering justice than the folks in Michigan are doing!
Several relatives and friends of the man who ambushed and killed four Seattle police officers last weekend have been arrested for assisting him when he was on the run (he’s since been shot and killed by a police officer). I’m very glad to see these additional arrests being made — we don’t prosecute accessories to crimes nearly as often as we should.
The ignominious head football coach at the University of Kansas, about whom I wrote back on 11/17/09, has resigned under pressure. That’s good, but university officials should still talk to me about how to write future coaching contracts so that someone who behaves as shamefully as this guy doesn’t get to walk away with millions of dollars.
Study this: Even as the FDA approved two more antipsychotic medications for prescription to children as young as ten years old, it also recommended further study of the long term consequences of a common side effect, weight gain. I think this trend whereby kids are being diagnosed and medicated as psychotic at younger and younger ages is psychotic in itself (see my column “A Perfect Storm” if you want to know why), and if you know of a child who’s been harmed by an antipsychotic medication, tell the parents to send me their story.
And study this: Here’s a positive one — a new broad-based study found no significant correlation between cell-phone use and brain cancer.
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