Doesn’t that just mean the person is ‘crazy’?
Also, if he felt the doctor was a threat, then why, after killing him, did he flee and try to hide the evidence of his crime?
Can we call this the douche bag defense? Your honor, it isn’t murder one because I’m a total douche bag.
Funny that you say Roeder had no mens rea for murder, yet you call Tiller “immoral,” when he obviously had no belief that he was doing anything wrong either.
You’re aware that these were not elective abortions, are you not?
Long before you get to crazy you pass through unreasonable. The world is full of examples. Take the 911 truthers for a moment. Are they crazy? (Crazy as in medically insane, not generally nutty.) I’d say no. But I’d also say that their beliefs are unreasonable.
ETA: Oh, and Don’t Call Me Shirley, I’m awfully glad to have helped!
Roeder was convicted of first-degree murder after about 40 minutes of deliberation.
Guilty - premeditated first-degree.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100129/ap_on_re_us/us_abortion_shooting_trial
Good.
As a pro-lifer, I say yay!
Yup. CNN is reporting it. This is what I expected would happen. Glad to see the jury got it right.
Good.
Will he get life in prison?
How many years of appeals are we in for now?
Not that I expect any of them to succeed based on my limited knowledge, just curious.
eta: gagundathar
From the linked article.
The article says it’s mandatory life with the possibility of parole after 25 years.
Roeder is 51, so he will be 76 before he can even start getting turned down by parole boards.
Let’s hope he gets the hard 50, but he’ll most likely die in prison either way.
Since he doesn’t face a death penalty, the appeal options are fewer, I think.
He’ll still be in prison while the appeals are going on, so it doesn’t really matter. They won’t amount to much more than a page 20 paragraph that this or that appeal was rejected in a couple of years, and that will be that.
I assumed Kansas had the death penalty. Glad to see I was wrong.
No. At least, not in the legal sense, the crazy-in-a-way-that-negates-criminal-liability sense.
If he had been allowed to present that defense, I am sure the jury would have been allowed to consider that question.
I agree the jury got it right.
And I agree this is a just verdict.
What not quite as sanguine as Hamlet that we’ve heard the last on that jury instruction, though. It’s very surprising to me that Roeder’s lawyer let him get on the stand and testify that did all that stuff without being sure he’d get in some little trinket of evidence they could hang imminent threat on and thereby demand their jury instruction.
I suspect Roeder and his lawyer knew his goose was cooked and figured they could squeeze out a last minute public service announcement for the cause.
Slight hijack. He stated that he wrapped up the gun and buried it.
Can I find it and auction it as a souvenir?
It was discarded and is technically trash. And no longer required as evidence in the trial.
Yes, I know it would be a rather sick collectible, but people have spent money on stranger things.
I thought I saw that it was a public defender. I sincerely doubt a public defender is some sort of crusader for the pro-life movement. He’s just doing his job.
Possibly intentional, but that would mean intentionally making it harder to introduce argumentation along the lines of Human Being! Human Being!