Clearly Hannibal understood the difference between right and wrong. I’d call him a psychopath. Some people regard that as a form of mental illness.
The verdict is still out as far as the cause of psychopathy. There appears to be a genetic factor and indication of a malfunctioning frontal lobe involved along with additional conditioning factors.
I still like the idea of rounding up psychopathic violators and putting them all someplace where they can develop their own society, along with all the materials they would need to do so with occasional delivery of supplies and food. Then the sentence would be, “You can’t live in our society so go ahead and live in the one you want to create. No reprieve.” Absolutely no interference in what they create. It belongs to them and so do the social rules.
That would either be psychopath heaven or hell, wouldn’t it now?
Mentally ill, in the “personality disorder” sense. Psychopath, for sure, which Robert Hare and his colleagues feel is a combination of the DSM-IV-TR categories of Antisocial Personality Disorder and Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
Personality disorders, according to the research, are extremely difficult to treat, due to the lack of insight on the part of the person with the disorder, and due to the slippery etiology of the disorder itself.
Lock him up, study him, treat him if you want, but never let him out, because his particular pathology will not be tamed.
Having a compulsion to eat human flesh (come on, it can’t taste that good!), and being willing to do so at great personal risk to one’s own life and liberty is not sane by any standard I can imagine. Hannibal may be very rational in other respects, but his apparent need to eat other people is intensely irrational.
Whether he is legally insane is another matter. As I understand it, the test is whether the perpetrator can understand that what they did was wrong. My impression is that Hannibal does not believe that what he does is wrong (although he probably understands quite well that society at large thinks that it is). People who know the books better than me may be be able to correct me on this, but I presume this is because he thinks of himself as some sort of superior being, or Nietzschian superman, to whom the rules do not apply. I think there must be a clinical term for that.
Even if he really were a Nietzschian superman, he would still be crazy for having a compulsion to eat people, although perhaps, if he knew (and thus understood) that it was wrong, it might not be the sort of crazy that would make him legally non-culpable.
I voted for mentally ill but kill him anyway. Normally I am against the death penalty even for sane killers, let alone insane ones, but Hannibal has demonstrated that it it is extremely difficult to keep him securely locked up, and he is extremely dangerous. (Thank goodness real criminals, and criminal lunatics, are never actually like this.)
I don’t think it matters whether or not he’s mentally ill. He’s too intelligent and resourceful to be kept safely in captivity, he’ll either escape or harm inmates or guards eventually. Kill him as soon as possible.
Which is what made “Red Dragon” the most interesting novel (and movie) in the series - this was a genuinely sympathetic serial killer. Not in the perversely warm-and-fuzzy “Dexter” sense (“oh, he only tortures bad people to death”), but in the sort-of-real-world sense that while this guy is clearly very dangerous, he’s equally clearly a victim himself. It’s a cold reader who cheers this character’s death, I think.
Eh, that didn’t seem quite like an order to shoot on sight, though - police don’t have an obligation to risk their own lives to capture criminals. Seems more like a reminder that these officers have a responsibility to preserve their own lives first and foremost. If Hannibal had come out with his hands up, clearly offering no resistance, I doubt he’d have been shot.
Kill him. Sure he only mostly kills assholes, but he also kills cops and ambulance drivers and disfigures nurses. I have no problem walking up to the glass and emptying a clip into him. Rabid dog and all that.
Nah. It was code. The officer in command couldn’t give the order to shoot a surrendering man on sight; that’s clearly murder. But he wasn’t worried about the cops putting their own lives in jeopardy to protect Hannibal’s; they all know that he’d murdered the two corrections officers, Boyle & Pembry (even if they were then mistaken about exactly what he’d done). TTake no special measures to protect his life means Whoever sees this guy first should accidentally shoot him as many times as possible.
I say kill him, but mostly because he’s too dangerous & smart to even keep in captivity. At best, I’d say lock him in a steel & concrete room, weld the door closed, and only have an opening large enough for food & waste bucket transfer. If he gets sick, or stops eating, or resorts to copraphagy, too bad for him - no one should put themselves at the slightest risk to help him.
And really, in the books that’s probably what would have happened if he wasn’t so interesting a criminal. There were hordes of psychiatrists & even grad students (wasn’t the person who left the ballpoint pen behind a grad student?) descending to study him. They should have just cut off all access to him.
And he kept himself interesting. He knew people would want to talk to him, study him, and he knew Chilton had a big ego about having him, so he no doubt kept a kind of “mysterious monster” allure going. I’m sure he even recieved marriage proposals.
I wonder how long Lecter would survive in that “Crazies’ Paradise” Tethered Kite mentioned. Throw him in a pit with Kemper and Maudsley.
Once again the good doctor sums it up quite well. Hannibal just has a personality disorder (ASPD), that’s notoriously hard to treat, and so it’s best for the criminal justice system to keep him.
The problem is that HL is like someone carrying an airborne disease; he has the strong capacity to infect people around him given almost any level of interaction. Plus, he enjoys doing so, and will create or enlarge any opportunity to screw with others. I am very glad that such people, if they exist at all, are extremely rare.
I see a lot of risking in keeping him alive in any capacity, and no real downside to his disappearance. I’m not a big death penalty person, but in this case I think it’s a matter of sheer pragmatism; put him down.
The only real solution to the fictional Hannibal Lecter is to shoot him on sight. He’s both crazy and evil, can’t be cured, and can’t be successfully segregated from society.
So we shoot him like a rabid dog. No need for torture, the important thing is to get rid of him as quickly as possible. And a plan for torture is a needless risk, because everyone can see that Lecter would turn the tables on his torturer and escape. Duh. And what does torture accomplish anyway? Once he’s dead the torture is over. So bullets it is. Or a handy hydraulic press or vat of molten metal if you don’t have a gun at the climax of the movie. I’d recommend against the classic “fall from a great height”, because you never really see the body after one of those.