Premeditation means the guy calmly, deliberately planned to kill this woman. No excuses. That means talk of redemption is unnecessary. There’s nothing to redeem.

The Army, for example, explicitly bought into this “booze=poor misguided woobie” and used to (and may still) cite that 52 % of rapes committed by or against service members were committed while booze was involved. (They didn’t mention who was drunk.) What they didn’t take on was the fact there’s only four points between 48% and 52%—but nobody wants to discuss that. That means half the rapists decided to rape somebody and did it while they were in full control of their faculties. Anybody who’s drunk enough to claim non culpability in the case of rape or murder—-crimes where men get the benefit of the doubt if the victim is a woman—-would be too drunk to commit the act.

I also call bullshit on the idea that committing a crime automatically means an abusive background. Funny how nobody believes that of women. The elephant in the room is that a lot of men who abuse women do it because they’ve weighed the odds, because they’ve found the odds to be loaded in their favor of getting away with it, and so they decided to go for it.

This is what is known as begging the question.

The original question was not the way intoxication affects culpability, but whether or not it should be considered. By putting it this way you are obviating the argument unfairly, my dear.

(Oh, and that’s where the MR apologist suggestion comes from.)

Mr. Mattir, I’m sorry if you are a “long time reader” who feels insulted. I’m also rather shocked that you were under the impression that I was a journalist. You did, however, make a mistake in your last comment. You laid out a list of expectations you have for me, as to how I operate this blog. You gave me a checklist of things I have to do. It is interesting that not only are you certain of yourself in telling me what I think in regards to issues over which I’ve said nothing, but that you feel that it is oK for you do give me specific instructions.

That is out of line. There are a lot of reasons I write this blog. None of them include being annoyed by you. I think you’ve made your point (that being drunk is an excuse for murder). You are now dismissed.

Markita, yes, I’m a layperson looking in, so my opinion is not as valuable as a lawyer. The county prosecutor here who charged bakdash agrees with me, not Mattir. My opinion may be of little value to you since I’m not a lawyer, and frankly it is not of that much value to me either, about this issue. But I would not say that we have evidence of all the lawyers thinking one thing and all the laypeople looking in thinking another.

This could have been an interesting discussion had it been more about the topic itself. Mattir chose to critique things that were not said and make her points so obscurely that I’m still not sure if she’s really saying that being drunk makes being raped less of a crime or not. And, she’d ended her career here on my blog by telling me that everyone else agrees with her that i’m an unprofessional journalist.

Yeah, I’ve had about 100 interesting conversations over the last 10 days. This was not one of them.

He [the politician] ran down someone who was standing away from him, as shown by security cameras, then declared that he felt threatened. Yes, he [the victim] grabbed onto the car–-but only after he’d been hit by it, to keep from going under the wheels. He [the politician] then left the scene of the crime and ditched the woman he’d been out with. But he’s an Ontario politician, so his version of the story gets credence.

You can have compassion and still deal out justice, guys.

Absolutely.

I was an male MRA and then an “MRA chick.”

Well, at least you admit it. Admitting it is the first step.

Also, can you point to any instance where I’ve said that I didn’t want this guy to be in prison for decades?

That’s actually somewhat mystifying to me. You have indeed said that you think 40 years is a good sentence, yet you can’t abide by premeditation (i.e., taking responsibility for having decided to kill people, acting on that, failing, then deciding to do it again, and having limited success, then stating publicly that they deserved it.)

In fact, the prosecutors were surprised at the 40 years that the judge doled out. They were thinking less with these particular convictions. The judge is the one being harsh here.