So said T.J. Lane, the 18-year-old convicted of killing three students at Ohio’s Chardon High School, to the families of his victims at his sentencing this week. From the Associated Press:
T.J. Lane, 18, had pleaded guilty last month to shooting at students in February 2012 at Chardon High School, east of Cleveland. Investigators have said he admitted to the shooting but said he didn’t know why he did it.
Lane was defiant during the sentencing, smiling and smirking throughout, including while four relatives of victims spoke.
After he came in, he calmly unbuttoned his blue dress shirt to reveal the T-shirt reading “killer,” which the prosecutor noted was similar to one he wore during the shooting.
At one point, he swiveled around in his chair toward the gallery where his own family members and those of the slain teenagers were sitting and spoke suddenly, surprising even his lawyer.
“The hand that pulls the trigger that killed your sons now masturbates to the memory,” he said, then cursed at and raised his middle finger toward the victims’ relatives.
Lane was given three life sentences with no possibility of parole, but I imagine his sassy mouth will get him slain in prison in no time.
Or maybe they could report on the fact that this guy suffers from psychosis and hallucinations. You know, like he wasn’t really mentally competent to stand trial for something he committed as a minor?
Or you could just mply your desire for vigilante justice against the mentally ill.
@Graham, the thing is, many of us don’t really care. All we see is another mentally ill murderer who could be released in a couple years when he is “cured” or has his illness “managed” if your 1970s era unicorn-dust misconceptions of the violently mental ill are practiced in courts, but hey, those were some other people’s kids, so who cares.
@bridger: I feel sorry for you if you think the best course of action for the mentally ill is to send them away for the rest of their lives for their crimes. This is a tragedy on many levels, but we as a society should take a look at how Norway treated Anders Behring Breivik. They did the right thing on many levels, with roughly the same result; except they skipped the whole puritanical vindictiveness that this case clearly had.
Mental illness might be the reason behind atrocities such as this, but it’s no excuse for it.
And the fact that he was a minor at the time is unimportant. As if some magical thing happens the exact moment when someone turns 18, making them more justifiably-accountable for their actions than they were a few minutes earlier — bullshit.
He should be judged based on what he did; when he happened to pop out of the womb should have no bearing on the matter. His reasons (or lack thereof) for committing such an act are irrelevant — it happened. It doesn’t matter if he was officially crazy at the time or not.
The best we can do now is to make sure that he doesn’t do it again, and the only way to do that is to lock him up for life or put him down. I’d prefer the latter, as i think that’s much more fair and fitting (not to mention cheaper), but i’m no judge.
Like bridger noted, it’s always someone else’s kids until it’s not.
Again, being crazy or mentally unstable are realities for many of us, but they aren’t excuses for us to take other people’s lives with impunity.
@HIT: So you’re in favor of the state euthanizing people with mental illnesses? Because treatment isn’t an option? That’s really humane of you.
Not “people with mental illnesses”. Just this guy.
To be honest, i have a hard time killing even a spider, but when someone like this dude does what he did and then spits in the faces of those most hurt by his actions, fuck him.
I don’t care if he’s ‘mentally ill’. That’s no excuse. Believing that EVERYONE is capable of being rehabilitated is a fairy tale, Graham. I wish it wasn’t so, but it so obviously is.
We have to admit to ourselves that some of us are no different than the vicious dog that can’t help but kill everything it sees. Yeah, maybe it was the way he was brought up, or because he was abused or traumatized in the past, or simply because he was born with some of his wires crossed, but that doesn’t change what he is today: a killer with no conscience that needs to be stopped.
Death, life in prison, whatever — it’s not my call, and it’s definitely a tough call to make for anyone with a heart. But do you actually mean to tell me that you think he should be allowed the chance to walk free again?? Have you not heard of instances where someone who was thought to have been successfully treated was released only for them to commit another, equally-as-horrific crime soon thereafter??
We are animals like any other, and sometimes our brains get broken. Not all things can be fixed.
@Graham. I just read what I wrote and didn’t see where I call for all mentally ill people to be sent away forever for criminal behavior. I specified the violently mentally ill as those that need to treated as other than victims whom we strive to return to society as soon as bureaucratically possible. I absolutely acknowledge that the vastest majority of mentally ill people pose no danger to society greater than an occasional inconvenience on the bus, but how is it that so many of us cannot see that some people are broken and that all the kings psychologists and psychiatrists cannot put them back together again? What we do with such people is certainly open for discussion, as long as it does not include putting them on the bus next to me or mine.
@bridger: Because you seem slow on the uptake and lacking on the reading comprehension: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Anders+Behring+Breivi…
This is horrific. Fuck this kid and anyone who looks like him.
Assassinate the murderer on site.
“This is horrific. Fuck this kid and anyone who looks like him.”
That’s an awful lot of White dudes. Be careful what ya wish for.
I’m saying- this person is not crazy. It seems that everything he said and did in that courtroom was for maximum shock value. He knew exactly what he was doing. Now, if he had turned to the victims families and said “McDonalds 39-cent Cheeseburger!” then THAT would be crazy. You don’t have to be ill to be a piece of shit.
@11
If he was black and I said the same thing………w.t.f???
Huh? What???
You would be alllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll over me. You….
This person is broken (it happens, for whatever reasons), and it would be best to remove him from the world. But of course liberals dislike capital punishment and it has its problems. No amount of therapy is going to make this individual “normal” (assuming this is not pretense, which I doubt).
Incidentally it is uncommon for anyone to be “slain” in prison for reasons relating to their crime, and it just not that common period. Who uses that word anyway? Is this 1840? As some one else pointed out, this is a bullshit lame duck vigilante attitude. What would it achieve?