The horror, the horror
The judge in the Greyhound beheading case has
found Vince Weiguang Li not guilty by reason of insanity. At the time he attacked Timothy McLean, the judge held, Li was suffering from schizophrenia and thought God was ordering him to kill, dismember, and cannibalize McLean.
Ok. If Li is insane, he is insane. We all understand that that you don’t try and sentence an insane man as you do an ordinary criminal.
But then comes this. Prepare to be sickened to the pits of your guts and your soul.
He will be institutionalized without a criminal record and will be reassessed every year by a mental health review board to determine if he is fit for release into the community.
“Will be reassessed every year to determine if he is fit for release…” Such is liberalism, which in its dessicated, rationalistic view of the good, and in its exclusive focus on the rights of the individual at the expense of the safety and well-being of society, reduces the evil of an evil act solely to the criminal intent of the actor. With the result that if the beheader and cannibal did not have the requisite guilty intent for society to hold him criminally responsible, and if some state-appointed board of psychiatrists (a profession notoriously lacking in an ordinary sense of morality) subsequently certifies that the beheader is not currently hearing voices in his head and is not at this moment dangerous, then society cannot hold him, he must be freed. Li could be on the streets, his own man, riding the Greyhound bus between Winnipeg and Manitoba, within a year. And if the Greyhound Company refuses to let him aboard, he’ll have a human rights case against them.
The truth that society must understand—that it must go beyond liberalism to understand—is that an act of monstrous evil is monstrously evil in itself regardless of the perpetrator’s subjective state; that a person who commits a monstrous act is existentially a monster even if he lacks what the law calls a guilty mind; and that it is unspeakable for society to be forced to endure the presence in it of a known and certified monster. From which it follows that the agent of a monstrous act, even if “not guilty by reason of insanity,” must be confined and kept separate from society for the rest of his life.
To require yearly reviews to determine whether the Greyhound beheader and cannibal ought to be released into society is to place society, and especially the family of the victim, under a perpetual sentence of horror. To allow even for the possibility of Li’s release epitomizes the evil of liberalism. But, so long as we remain liberals ourselves, then no matter how much we are sickened by this evil, we will have no alternative to offer to it.
* * *
Here are VFR articles on the murder of Timothy McLean.
- end of initial entry -
Laura W. writes:
If Canadians don’t rise up against this inconceivable judgment, this primitive rejection of communal standards, add them to the death count.
Guilt in the way you have defined it is an ancient and hallowed concept of Western civilization. “Drive me from here with all the speed you can to where I may not hear a human voice,” Oedipus says when he discovers he has committed an outrageous crime without realizing it. These words are the most beautiful, the most heart-rending evocation of the philosophical notion that guilt is the commission of an evil deed regardless of intention. Responsibility for even the most horrific acts can happen to people in the way cancer happens to its victims. Oedipus did it, and was no longer fit to be a member of the community. Is it possible that even Li is secretly horrified by his sentence? Don’t even the insane wish to live in a civilized world?
LA replies:
Thank you for seeing this and expanding on the point I was trying to make.
Laura replies:
No, thank you.
Can you imagine how betrayed the McLean family must feel? Truthfully, I can’t imagine it. Where can one go to absorb such an experience, to put oneself in their shoes? Perhaps to Greek tragedy with its fixation on the outer and inner dimensions of violence. Think of it. Every year, perhaps for the rest of their lives, these people must appear before bureaucrats to relive their son’s death and to meet face-to-face the man who ate his eyes. It is they who have been banished from human society to an island, an earthly hell.
Kidist Paulos Asrat writes from Canada:
The interesting thing about the Greyhound bus beheader/cannibal/murderer Li is that Mclean’s mother, Carol deDelley, is accusing the Canadian government and its immigration policies for accepting a mentally ill Chinese man into the country. Of course, there has been talk of his deportation, but he’s a citizen now. So, deDelley’s comment is the logical FIRST step to avoid this kind of thing in the first place. She’s smarter than all the lawyers put together.
She’s also trying to pass what she calls “Tim’s Law” where:
The legislation would mean that a person found not criminally responsible for a violent, unpredicatable crime would face incarceration for life, with no possibility of parole, yet receive treatement within prison [and not an institution].
It’s the best she can do.
One of the reasons the Crown gave for the verdict it made was that it was legally and MORALLY bound to do so! Morally.
I think the death count Laura W. writes of occurred when the RCMP took five hours at the scene of the crime to get into the bus to confront and put down Li, allowing him his grotesque charade. And, their radio transmissions show that they were watching him and describing what he was doing.
It all just gets worse. TV commentators are talking about how polite and reserved Li has been in court, i.e. he’s really a good man after all, except for that moment of insanity. No-one asks how the mother feels, they just put a microphone infront of her mouth.
And she’s fighting against all this.
LA replies:
You’re absolutely right. The proper reaction of the police—the reaction of the police in a morally non-dead society—would have been to board the bus and shoot him dead.
Then we wouldn’t have to be dealing with the question of what to do with him.
Ken Hechtman writes from Canada:
A couple of observations (and I’ll try to carry these all the way to a philosophical conclusion):
1. You haven’t said it outright, but I detect the conservative party line on insanity—that it’s a form of mental and moral weakness and as such there’s always going to be some residual responsibility for monstrous crimes committed by insane people. I’m going to guess—correct me if I’m wrong—that this connects to the conservative idea that there’s a non-material basis of human consciousness, what they called a “soul” in the old days.
The liberal view is that consciousness is purely material. Therefore its material substrate—the brain—can malfunction for purely material reasons. The schizophrenic brain acts on false sense data and false memories that it has absolutely no way of distinguishing from real ones. And nobody is to blame. The catch-phrase I use is “He never asked for a chemical time-bomb to go off in his head.
Similarly, if a person who normally knows right from wrong and has some degree of self-control takes enough of certain drugs they will become psychotic and homicidal and monstrous—look up “Amphetamine Psychosis” and “Roid Rage” to see what I’m talking about. Responsibility for taking the drug applies in that case, but it still turns you into a completely different person, like Jekyll-and-Hyde different.
For the last five years, I’ve lived in the same house with my girfriend’s schizophrenic sister. I’ve learned a little bit about what goes on inside her mind. When we talk about a schizophrenic “hearing voices,” it’s important to take that 100 percent literally. When we say about ourselves “A voice in my head told me … ” it’s a metaphor. What we really mean is “A thought popped into my head. Although I recognize full well it was my own, it was still unexpected.” But as far as schizophrenics know, they heard it. It came from an outside entity and they heard it. They are as sure of that as you are that you’re not imagining the words you’re reading right now.
2. So what should the criminal justice system do with a guy like Vince Li? Again, you haven’t said it outright, but what you did say is consistent with the conservative view that the justice system’s purpose is to deliver punishment. The standard liberal view that its purpose is to deliver rehabilitation. I believe both are incomplete. The justice system’s deliverable is public safety. Punishment and rehabilitation are just two tools and I want both to be available on a case by case basis.
The thing liberals need to remember about rehabilitation is there’s a big difference between what we’d like to do and what we know how to do. We do not know how to “fix” a Vince Li. The best we can do is put him on powerful anti-psychotic drugs. His hallucinations won’t go away but they’ll be less frequent and more benign. More importantly, he’ll be too weak, slow and un-coordinated to act on the really dangerous ones. That’s why they call anti-psychotics “the chemical straitjacket.” As long as he takes his meds, he’ll be safe in the outside world. If he stops taking them, the hallucinations will come back with a vengeance and he won’t be safe anymore. He should be locked up until either he dies or the psychiatric field experiences a quantum breakthrough.
Hypothetical question: Suppose we did have a magic pill that could completely and permanently and 100 percent reliably cure Vince Li? Would justice still demand that once cured, he stay locked up forever for something he wasn’t responsible for and would never do again?
LA replies:
First, I didn’t speak of punishment, though that could be brought into it, and Laura’s comment touched on punishment. I spoke solely of the point that it would be a moral horror for such a man ever to go free among society, not because I want to punish him, but because society should never have to endure the presence of such a creature among them. There are certain acts that end forever a person’s right to be in society, whether or not he’s considered “responsible” for the act. The fact that he physically committed that act banishes him forever, period.
Which answers your question. If he were 100 percent reliably cured, he must still be confined from society for the rest of his life.
But I repeat, in a moral society, the police would have boarded the bus while he was cannibalizing his victim and shot him dead. And then we wouldn’t have to be dealing with him at all. Some people should simply be dead. A fact to which liberals just cannot relate.
Paul S. writes:
The whole concept of not guilty by insanity is suspect. What it does is that it places a value judgement on the state of the mind. If a crime is committed, the person should be sentenced for the act, not his state of mind while he was committing the act. Hate crimes are a further extension of this.
LA replies:
I know that the “not guilty by reason of insanity” has been taken too far. But I haven’t thought through where the line should be. The idea that there should be no punishment at all if the person was not considered responsible for his act does not strike me as right. A wrong act was done, regardless of the actor’s state of mind. That act must be paid for. Society must show its intolerance for that act. But again I haven’t worked this out.
Ken Hechtman writes:
Shakespeare expressed my comment a lot shorter and a lot better:
Was’t Hamlet wrong’d Laertes? Never Hamlet:
If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away,
And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes,
Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it.
Who does it, then? His madness: if’t be so,
LA replies:
Not the most apt example, and your use of it shows how you have not grasped the problem I’m addressing here. All Hamlet did was insult Laertes and get into a tussle with him. He didn’t behead and cannibalize him.
Ken H. replies:
Also, Hamlet was lying when he said it and Laertes was lying when he pretended to believe it. [LA replies: That never occurred to me. What makes you say that Hamlet was lying?]
But it does express my point. Hamlet-when-mad and Hamlet-when-sane should be understood and judged as two different people. And if the madness extends to cannibalism, that shows just how different they are. [LA replies: You’re still missing the fundamental point. It’s not just about the abstract responsibility of the person. It’s about a horrible act, which society must respond to. The liberal approach leaves society with no response to that act at all.]
Have you ever had a friend who had a drug-induced psychotic reaction? They don’t need to have done anything as extreme as beheading and cannibalism but even with smaller crimes and smaller judgements, the principle still holds. The next day, you accept that they weren’t in their right mind when they did whatever they did and you let it slide. You don’t cut them out of your life the way you would if you thought they knew what they were doing. [LA replies: if the friend had beheaded and cannibalized someone I would cut him out of my life. I don’t accept that “criminal responsibility” as determined by a court is the sole dimension of evil.]
It certainly works the other way. None of the good things my sister’s girlfriend did before she went crazy at the age of 17 count in her favor or mitigate how she gets treated now. We deal with the person in front of us.
LA writes:
A liberal reader said that I’m wrong to attribute the temporary insanity defense to liberalism, since mental elements have been part of the criminal law for several hundred years, even before the United States and liberalism existed. I replied to him:
Do you think that, say, 200 years ago, or 70 years ago, if a man had committed a monstrous crime like Vince Li’s and found insane, that the door would be open for him to be released as soon as a board of psychiatrists found him to be “ok”? No. Society would have kept him locked up for a long, long time. I don’t know exactly the basis on which they would have done it, but they would not have released him.
What is the difference between modern liberalism and older forms of liberalism or pre-liberalism? With older liberalism, there is a concern for the well being of society, society has rights and concerns, not just the individual. For example, it would not be expected that society should endure the presence of a beheader and cannibal.
Under (modern) liberalism, the individual and his rights have become the whole thing, basically turning society into nothing but an instrument for the protection and expansion of individual rights and privileges. Under modern liberalism, there is no notion that there is anything objectionable about a beheader and cannibal being released into society. If he was not guilty by reason of insanity, and if he’s now he’s no longer insane, there’s no reason to hold him. End of story. No other considerations come into it. This is what I call liberalism.
Yes, the insanity defense has existed for a long time. But in the past it was tempered and balanced by a larger moral framework, which liberalism has cast aside by reducing the situation to nothing but the insanity defense.
March 6
Karen writes from England:
That’s appalling!
In Britain such a person would be convicted of manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility and sentenced to a period of compulsory detention and treatment in a secure mental hospital or hospital wing of a prison. The crime is murder but if the perpetrator lacks mens rea, then the charges are lowered to manslaughter and he remains guilty of the crime. Such a person should never be released from state control, as his stablity after such a serious episode of mental illness cannot be predicted or guaranteed. In this case, it looks as though Lee will be out in no time.
LA replies:
But if he lacks mens rea how can be be sentenced for manslaughter?
Laura W. writes:
I disagree with Ken Hechtman’s description of the conservative position on the insanity defense. He exaggerates the conservative’s recognition of the non-material and portrays him as an ignorant rube when it comes to the brain and personality as physical realities. In fact, the murderer who has committed a horrible crime under the influence of insanity may be viewed in a healthy society as purely a victim. That’s why the standard is humane treatment in confinement. But, he cannot remove the taint of his crime nor, of course, practically can society ever guarantee despite all the conceivable advances of psychotropic medication that he will never commit a comparable one.
Why is it possible to say that someone can never remove the “taint” of a murder even if he is suffering from psychotic delusions? The answer turns on the conviction that life is sacred and irreplaceable, not simply a material happenstance. The madman with a verdict of perpetual exile may be a martyr. He may be a martyr to this reverence for the individual and for life itself. His sentence upholds the victim’s humanity and of course that of the criminal himself for it recognizes his potential as a free agent, a capacity for free will which constitutes the essence of his worth and is a good which insanity can seldom entirely take away.
Interestingly, when speaking of upholding a reverence for life, the perpetrator isn’t necessarily more guilty if he kills a good, upstanding citizen than if he kills a bad one. No one asks whether Tim McLean was a saint. The point is that life was destroyed. Furthermore, in McLean’s case, his body was desecrated, an entirely different crime from murder and a heinous violation of the widespread view that the body even after death is both a material and spiritual good to society and to those who loved the victim.
Hechtman asks “Suppose we did have a magic pill that could completely and permanently and 100 percent reliably cure Vince Li? Would justice still demand that once cured, he stay locked up forever for something he wasn’t responsible for and would never do again?”
Such a one-time pill if ever invented would be a far greater punishment to Li than permanent confinement. Not only would it be likely to have irretrievable physical effects, as there has never been a significant medication invented by man that did not, but it would so alter Li’s personality as to be essentially a form of psychological murder. Liberals profess to being humane, when in fact they often portray a latent disregard, sometimes even contempt, for those who have mental diseases, revealing an underlying view of them as not fully human.
In the conservative view, a sentence is not ultimately for either punishment or rehabilitation. Its purpose is to perpetuate communal standards. Paradoxically, when a society reneges on its duty to respond to evil, even under the influence of compassion for the mentally ill, it does not lessen suffering, it augments it.
LA replies:
“In the conservative view, a sentence is not ultimately for either punishment or rehabilitation. Its purpose is to perpetuate communal standards.”
Excellent. Laura has just articulated the rationale for our position. I wonder if this has been done before. It’s the deeper principle that underlies punishment, and explains why, even if a man who had committed a horrible crime has had a complete personality change and has become the sweetest person on earth, he must be punished. But liberals, who can’t see beyond the material person, who have no view of man as a moral being, would only say, “How can you punish this nice person?”
Remember the case of the woman in Texas convicted of a vicious murder and then she had had some reform or religious conversion in jail and all the liberals wanted her to be pardoned of the death sentence? Other people understood she had to pay for what she did. This is what makes America still a moral country, and worthy of love; it’s why we’re not completely dead, as in they are in Europe.
To release a Vince Li into society is to say, “We, as a society, have no problem with a monster walking among us who stabbed a man dozens of times in the chest, then beheaded him, then proceeded to cut off parts of his face and ate his eyes.” Which would make society completely nihilistic. That’s why, even if Li had no mens rea, he must be kept confined. The purpose is to perpetuate communal standards, to maintain a society in which human beings can decently live. But liberalism doesn’t care about maintaining a society in which human beings can decently live. it only cares about protecting the equal rights of individuals.
Replying to the original entry (sent to a mailing list yesterday), Andrew McCarthy writes:
Larry, that is as cogent a statement of this principle as I have seen. Well done.
March 7
Steve R. writes:
Suppose there are only two people left on Earth. And one of them kills the other. Don’t we all agree that the killer should die—yet in such a situation there would be no community to instruct. My hypothetical is to point out that a monstrously evil act deserves to met with justice not to uphold communal standards. It is because there exists a transcendent order and a terrible violation of that order demands the natural consequences of the violation..
I have heard that according to Judaism, if an animal kills an innocent human it must be put to death. I don’t see how upholding communal standards could be the reason. It would seem that the custom/rule exists, again, because the taking of precious human life is a violation of the transcendent order that demands justice.
LA replies:
That’s interesting. I think I read Laura’s argument as implying the very thing you’re saying. I didn’t take it as meaning that there must be consequences for an evil act in order to perpetuate communal standards, whatever those standards happen to be. I took it as saying that the community’s standards are founded on a transcendent moral order, and if there are no consequences for a monstrously evil act, that order is violated and the community is thrown into disorder.
Ken Hechtman writes:
Have you ever had a friend who had a drug-induced psychotic reaction? They don’t need to have done anything as extreme as beheading and cannibalism but even with smaller crimes and smaller judgements, the principle still holds. The next day, you accept that they weren’t in their right mind when they did whatever they did and you let it slide. You don’t cut them out of your life the way you would if you thought they knew what they were doing. [LA replies: if the friend had beheaded and cannibalized someone I would cut him out of my life. I don’t accept that “criminal responsibility” as determined by a court is the sole dimension of evil.]
Granted. But I’m trying to get the thin end of the wedge in. If it was a lesser offence, deserving a lesser reaction on your part, would you let that lesser offense slide? [LA replies: I can’t answer the question in the abstract. If it were some ordinary crime the person had committed while insane, that would be one thing. If it were something really evil, that would be something else.]
I think I’m getting closer to understanding your “transcendent” better than I did before. Let me paraphrase the argument back to you. You and Laura W say that there’s this evil, this taint, that has this independent existence and is somehow connected to Vince Li’s body even if the psychotic personality that did the evil is just as dead as if the mounties had shot him in the act. [LA replies: I think that’s a strange way of putting Laura’s and my position.]
Laura W’s observations on “death of personality” are also explored in two episodes of Babylon 5 (here and here).
In this liberal future, murderers aren’t physically executed. Instead, their personalities and memories are erased and replaced with benign ones, “whose only wish is to serve society”, in the words of the show.
“The Quality of Mercy” establishes that from the murderer’s point of view, this is no different than a lethal injection. The “him” that closes his eyes before the procedure will never open them again. So he’s ready to go just as far to escape the sentence as he would a “real” execution.
“Passing Through Gethsemane” shows the other side of it. From the point of view of the victims’ families (as it is from yours) “death of personality” isn’t good enough. As long as the murderer’s body lives, they believe they’re denied justice. [LA replies: I find the fiction too far out from reality to relate to it. Also, I don’t really believe that someone like Li had no responsibility for what he did. I guess what I’m saying is that don’t fully accept the insanity defense, though I haven’t worked this out and can’t explain it.]
You know (though some of your readers may not) that a friend of mine did behead and cannibalize someone 20 years ago. [LA replies: if you told me that at some point, I hadn’t remembered it.]
I’ve had to think about this before and not in the abstract. I had just left New York when Dan was arrested. My girlfriend-of-the-time stayed close to him during his trial and used to visit him in Riker’s and then Bellevue. She’d call me in Montreal and ask if I had anything to say to him. I’d pass on bits of chit-chat through her (more because it was what she wanted than because it was what I wanted) until eventually she took up with another guy. When I lost touch with her, I lost touch with Dan. I never made the effort to contact him on my own.
For what it’s worth, I remember thinking at the time that if we were the anarchist outlaws we said we were, we should have dealt with Dan on our own. He was one of us, his victim was sort-of one of us, the crime happened on our turn. It wasn’t our court trying him and it wasn’t under our laws. But he *was* our problem.
Laura W. writes (posted March 10):
Ken Hechtman says:
“You and Laura W say that there’s this evil, this taint, that has this independent existence and is somehow connected to Vince Li’s body even if the psychotic personality that did the evil is just as dead as if the mounties had shot him in the act.”
A human being cannot possess multiple personalities anymore than he can possess multiple bodies. Personalities change, sometimes dramatically, but they retain continuity. The idea of multiple selves is a myth, the stuff of science fiction not real life.
But, that’s a whole other issue. One of the basic points is that human beings, even judges and psychologists, can never plumb the mind enough to know how much free will is involved in any act. Since free will is the foundation of community, without which there is no government and no civil society, we give it the benefit of the doubt and assume it plays some factor in all serious crimes. To do otherwise is to jeopardize the notion of free will and therefore undermine our existence as self-governing people who are responsible for our acts. In the case of lesser crimes, treatment and release are appropriate. With grave assaults and murder, they are not.
I’m sorry to hear Ken had a friend who also killed and ate someone. Oh, Canada! You are not as innocent as I thought.
posted March 11
Steve R. writes:
Suppose there are only two people left on Earth. And one of them kills the other. Don’t we all agree that the killer should die—yet in such a situation there would be no community to instruct. My hypothetical is to point out that a monstrously evil act deserves to met with justice not to uphold communal standards. It is because there exists a transcendent order and a terrible violation of that order demands the natural consequences of the violation..
I have heard that according to Judaism, if an animal kills an innocent human it must be put to death. I don’t see how upholding communal standards could be the reason. It would seem that the custom/rule exists, again, because the taking of precious human life is a violation of the transcendent order that demands justice.
:LA replies:
That’s interesting. I think I read Laura’s argument as implying the very thing you’re saying. I didn’t take it as meaning that there must be consequences for an evil act in order to perpetuate communal standards, whatever those standards happen to be. I took it as saying that the community’s standards are founded on a transcendent moral order, and if there are no consequences for a monstrously evil act, that order is violated and the community is thrown into disorder.
STeve R. replies:
Having reread Laura’s full comment, I agree that her words “communal standards” could easily be interpreted to exclude the standards of a modern liberal or a cannabalistic community.
But more importantly, is the impossible happening?—bringing Ken Hectman, the model inveterate liberal, “closer to understanding your transcendent” … “that has this independent existence”?
Of course there is much work to be done; Ken’s immediate comments in context with his new found insight center on fictional novels he has read about the perpetrator’s memory, personality, potential altruism and unrequited justice for the victim’s family -each of which runs counter to the preeminence of an independent transcendent moral order.
LA replies:
I don’t think Ken Hechtman is having a glimpse of the transcendent, based on his sci-fi way of trying to come to terms with the idea!
April 22
Laura G., who is an M.D., writes:
DREADFUL event in every way. In some perverse way, I think that the sentence is related to the issue of whether one views society as made up of numerous groupings or of individual citizens, some of whom will have shared interests but all of whom have their largest shared interests in the well-being of the society as a whole, because that society is itself one individual after another. The “liberal” view is that you can divide societies into groups such as women, teachers, elderly, incarcerated, illegals, and so forth, and then tailor policies to pander and solicit votes and power to or from some particular one group. In this case, the group that is being pandered to is criminals and their supporters including lawyers.
One of the writers expressed very well the unending blackness of having to live in a society that compels the family to have to be involved in the continued legal wranglings of the murderer. Forever. In a somewhat less intense way, I see this disaster playing out in living Technicolor for my patients. My practice examines children for sexual abuse, and they often have to testify again, and again, and again in one of the interminable court hearings regarding their perpetrators. It just grinds down them and their families. We are so, so focused on the “rights of the accused” side of the ledger, and any rights of the victim are so marginalized. The issue is very sore for me just now because last week, a child who had earlier already gone through DSS court and had been confirmed by the court to have been abused now had to testify again in criminal court. A rogue jury was talked into the existence of a fantasy perpetrator (O.J. lives on), while the living perpetrator who was actually on trial was found not guilty. The scene at court was a madhouse (the child screaming at the jury, the jury in tears and apologizing, the child now unsafe, one jury member trying to take back his vote, just a complete balagan). It will take massive mercy from the Almighty to allow this child to recover and become an adult. I can’t imagine how the family of the cannibal’s meal will cope. Not good. Thanks for hosting the discussion.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 05, 2009 03:16 PM | Send