"He blamed his mother for chewing her food too loudly and his sister’s bad accent as part of a plan to drive him mad."

Said the teenager, who killed his parents and sister 46 years ago. He spent 6 years in a mental institution, then changed his last name, studied psychology, and became a professor.

The pony-tailed professor, Dr. James St. James — the head of Millikin University’s psychology department — was outed by a Texas reporter with the Georgetown Advocate, a newspaper based in the town where St. James fatally shot his parents and 17-year-old sister on Aug. 4, 1967.

One student said: "He really is a good guy. I have really fond memories, and I feel sorry for him, because now his life is all turned upside down."

ADDED: More here.

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A much-criticized WaPo headline: "What motivates a lawyer to defend a Tsarnaev, a Castro or a Zimmerman?"

That still runs atop an article by lawprof Abbe Smith which explains the role of the defense lawyer within the criminal justice system. The explanation is familiar to anyone who's considered the topic beyond the shallowest level, but the article appears in the Washington Post because of all the attention to the Zimmerman trial, which explains the presence of the acquitted neighborhood watchman alongside the names of the evil Castro and the accused terrorist Tsarnaev.

The headline drew fire. At Breitbart.com: "the Washington Post outlandishly sought to equate the acquitted Robert [sic] Zimmerman to accused serial rapist Ariel Castro and Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev." At Instapundit: "Which one of these things is not like the others?... 'Tsarnaez = Castro = Zimmerman? Why not just throw in a Hitler? That’s usually how the question is posed at cocktail parties.'"

So look at how this article is teased on the front page at WaPo right now:



Quick! Roll out the Kaczynski!

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Death penalty for killing an unborn child?

We won't find out in the Ariel Castro case whether it's legal to impose the death penalty for causing the death of a fetus, because he's pleaded guilty and received the sentence of life in prison plus 1,000 years.

After Castro was apprehended, Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty said his office intended to seek charges not only for the sexual assaults endured by the victims, but also “each act of aggravated murder he committed by terminating pregnancies.”... Two counts of the indictment are for aggravated murder in the deaths of two unborn babies.

The prosecutor had noted that Ohio law provides for the death penalty for the "most depraved criminals who commit aggravated murder during the course of a kidnapping."

Here's the 2008 U.S. Supreme Court case, Kennedy v. Louisiana, which found the death penalty for rape (even rape of a child) to be unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment. No one has been executed in the U.S. for a crime other than murder since the 1960s, though the Kennedy case leaves open the possibility of capital punishment "for other non-homicide crimes, ranging from drug-trafficking to treason."

Also in the news today:

The U.S. Justice Department will not seek the death penalty for U.S. intelligence leaker Edward Snowden, Attorney General Eric Holder wrote to Russian authorities in a letter dated July 23.

That's part of the argument for extradition (and against asylum). None of the current charges against Snowden carry the death penalty, but espionage and treason do.

I suspect we'll never see another case in this country where someone receives the death penalty for anything other than murder (and not including fetal homicide where the mother doesn't also die).

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"What's up with Cleveland?"

"Why so many high-profile crimes in such a short span? Why such violence against the metro area's women?"

Cleveland's police department declined a CNN request to talk about the recent crimes. But to those who study the city, some patterns do emerge: crushing poverty, dehumanizing unemployment and thousands of tumbledown vacant homes -- ideal places to rape and kill in the shadows.

"I hate to say this, but in a sense, to a large degree, we have an underclass in the city of Cleveland of those that truly are disconnected from the social fabric, from the mainstream economy and society," said Ronnie Dunn, an urban studies professor at Cleveland State University. "They're left without anything to grasp onto."

Who are "they"? The murder rate in Cleveland is lower than in Baltimore and Detroit, but the rape rate is more than double that of Baltimore or Detroit.

"There are some things in the culture in this area where it appears that the lives of women in particular have been devalued," [Dunn] said.

He said some men seem emasculated by their economic plight, and violence sometimes results. "They manifest their lack of control in a violent manner against women," Dunn said. "It might not always result in murder, but it often does in physical abuse."

How could poverty explain why Cleveland is different from Baltimore and Detroit? Poverty is a cause and an effect, but why would the effect involve so much more violence against women in one place as opposed to another? I take it the murder rate mostly involves male-on-male violence, so we need a theory that explains why, in Cleveland, as opposed to Baltimore and Detroit, the violence channels toward women.

Or fall back to the theory offered by the rape crisis center director quoted at the link: There is no difference in the rape rate, only the rate of reporting rape. Murders are harder to ignore, there being a dead body, so maybe the disparities between rape and murder rates are really evidence of the willingness to report crime, and what Cleveland has is a more positive police-citizen relationship. Or maybe the local cultures differ in how they perceive incidents and what they are willing to say is rape. Maybe a higher incidence of rape reports is a sign of improvement. Note that the rape statistic counts reports of rape, not how the cases are ultimately resolved.

ADDED: This was an interesting article, with a headline that admits it's showing us questions, not answers. ("More questions than answers in Cleveland's run on high-profile crime.") But it's actually appalling that there's so little insight on display. With all the professors like Dunn in all the urban studies departments — including Cleveland State University, right there in Cleveland — why don't we have much more fine-grained information and analysis of the causes? "Poverty" is the go-to root cause of ideologues everywhere, and the causal chain from poverty to emasculation to raping women sounds like what anybody might say off-the-cuff at a cocktail party if the subject turned to the question of rape in Cleveland.

Are there not urban places beset by economic hardship where the people nevertheless preserve their moral standards and maintain community? The mainstream media tell us about the cities in the worst decline and they assume, if people are poor, they can't be moral. That's a distorted, scurrilous, and harmful message. What are people in Cleveland, Detroit, and Baltimore supposed to think when they hear that?

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Up on the roof.

1. Male on female.

2. Female on male.

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"3 Mammals That 'Choose' Their Babies’ Sex."

Yes, one of the 3 is the human being.

Interesting use of the word "choose." I assume that's intended to resonate with the right to choose, and the argument is something like: The vaal rhebok and the francois’ langur are doing it too, so we ought go all out with the sex-selection technology — abortions and all. Don't let the beasts get the jump on us!

We used to try to rise above the animals — they also "choose" infanticide and other murder — but that's been turned around. Now, we fuzzily yearn to emulate what we see in the natural world.

And by "see," I mean seeing what we want to see — typical human style. Any other animal indulging in our kind of see-what-you-want-to-see perceptions would have gone extinct long ago.

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"Terrible as it sounds, it was easier than divorcing him," says the 21-year-old woman, hiring a hitman.

"I didn't have to worry about the judgment of my family. I didn't have to worry about breaking his heart... It's going to break my heart when it happens, but it's something that I've been thinking about for a while."

That's all on video which you can see at the link. She amazingly smiling and sweet, as she arranges to pay $50,000 out of her husband's $400,000 life insurance to the "hitman" who, it turns out, is a cop.

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