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The Virus Did It
scubacuda writes "The Inquirer and Get Reading report that a UK man accused of having pornographic pictures of kids on his computer was acquitted after a court heard that his machine was infected with a Trojan on his PC which probably auto-downloaded the images. (In light of moves like Operation Ore, we'll probably hear more defenses like this.)"
This bloke lived near me, he was hounded out of his home by ignorant fuckwits who presume that becuase somebody lives with their mother and father (after the age of 18) and is being done for paedophile images, the must be guilty.
It's a bit of a wake up call to the moronic masses that people can be innocent as well as guilty!
Forgive the sound of the dying giraffe, but I have to say that the insanity defense is no joke. NGRI is something under constant attack by people who don't really understand it.
Consider this: you are driving your car. you hit a baby, baby dies. You weren't driving particularly recklessly, under the speedlimit, visibility was just low. It's sad and it happens.
Consider this: you are drunk, driving your car. And by drunk, I mean you are impaired. You aren't driving particularly recklessly, but the same thing as above happens.
Now, this doesn't apply to NGRI directly, but consider this: the circumstances around a crime impact the meaning of it. Both of those situations flat out suck, but the argument is that you were being especially irresponsible in the second case, but not in the first.
Let's say you are sane and you kill a guy named Sam. (Sorry, Sam.) He kicked your dog, and now you're going to pump his head full of lead and do some of that stuff out of the first scene of "Way of the Gun".
Now, consider case two: you are insane, and you believe that Jodie Foster is in love with you and tells you to do things, and you feel complied to do so. You are not even aware of your delusion, and the fact that you are having the delusion implies that a great deal of your judgement is impaired. In fact, you could say that you didn't know what you were doing - you can still remember doing them, but you thought you were killing the martian high leader of the invasion force or something. In this case, are you responsible for killing a man, or are you responsible for falling for a delusion, which to you seemed very, very real.
I argue that in this case, you are not guilty of the crime you are charged with because you frankly were not in control of your reality.
And ultimately, if you look up statistics on the defense, you'll find that it is hardly ever used, does not work when it should, and that the mean time spent incarcerated in mental hostpitals by NGRI people is higher than the mean time spent in prison for the same crime.
There is actually a famous case where a guy shot somebody very important under the compulsion of one of his delusionary characters and was found not guilty by reason of insanity, who is now sitting, treated, recovered, in a mental hospital, getting clean review after clean review and not being released by the board that controlls his release.
Whine as much as you want about the implications of this trojan defense, but don't equate it or compare it to the not guilty be reason of insanity defense. They are quite different.
Also, note that it *IS* possible that a trojan's job would be to search for child pornography on Kazaa or something. Ultimately it'll probably just pull up legit porn, but somebody COULD design such a program.
Now, granted that, the prosecution should have made a serious attempt to disprove the defendants claims. I suspect they did otherwise.
Once again, sorry for bleating like a dying, clubbed baby seal, but I felt that I should add that although I don't have any links that I can think of right now DIRECTLY on the subject, I would like to direct you to a series of essays on kuro5hin.org, written by a man living with schizoaffective disorder. Although it probably won't change your viewpoints, perhaps upon reading about some of this guy's experiences, you'll have a building block to construct a more enlightened philosophy of justice and of mental disorder.
There are so many of these Big Brother spying technologies, I don't even know where to begin. You should at least learn about Echelon II, though.
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