SnipErlite said:
0_O Do people like this really think their justifications will stand up?
Like, honestly? That's no fucking reason to shake a baby.... *Sigh*.
Unless she genuinely believes that Farmville is to blame. In which case this is even more creepy.
Actually it's a good chance it will stand up. Farmville being involved is going to be irrelevent except to those looking to attack video games for the sake of them being video games.
It's called "Hest Of The Moment" and it's a mitigating factor that can be applied to a lot of things, but most typically to cases of murder and manslaughter. The arguement being that when a person is extremely angry they can become temporarly insane and thus no longer fully liable for their actions. The original reasoning behind this was for cases of someone baiting another person to attack them. The idea being that if someone gets another person full of enough rage through their actions or comments, the attack while still unlawful can be considered somewhat understandable and justified. Precedent being what it is however this has been warped well outside of it's original intent.
Right now the big question is going to be whether the judge believes that a video game could have gotten her angry enough to overreact like that in a fit of blind-rage induced insanity. The arguement has been made about many things besides games.
Either the judge is going to rule that she's lying, and she calmly, and with premeditation chose to shake her baby to death. Unlikely because we're looking at second degree murder at the moment. OR he's going to rule that she was driven into a rage by a factor like a video game. This could be because of the intensity of the content, or more likely because she herself is deemed to be unstable (the rage itself over something like this being the proof) and thus will face reduced charges due to being considered insane.
This could play out a lot of differant ways, we'll have to see what happens. I don't know her, I haven't seen the trial, and don't know specifically what was said.
It *IS* possible that this could backlash on Zynga if the court decides to rule on record that it feels that Zynga's product is capable of impairing the judgement of perfectly rational and stable adults so they do things like this. The anti-game movement would have a field day with that, but as things stand now it doesn't seem likely that it's going there.
If I had to guess I'd say with the second degree murder ruling that what is going to happen is the Judge is going to deem that she was unstable to be influanced by this game that way to begin with, and probably be made to seek counseling while she's in prison, or perhaps even be committed (though that is far less likely nowadays). I'm sure she'll spend a few years locked up somewhere, but I doubt she'll wind up actually serving a 25 to 50 year sentence.
I could of course be wrong about this, that's just my gut feeling.
Besides, as horrible as it is for a baby to be killed, as far as I know she might really be unstable in a fashion that is treatable. To be entirely honest one of the problems I think our current society has is not being able to deal with people that REALLY have psychological problems which is why so many of them wind up on the streets and so on. The doctors, medication, and other things are very expensive, and the goverment doesn't pick up the tabs for this kind of thing quite like they used to. While insanity is used as an excuse for a lot of things where it clearly wasn't a facotr, I don't believe that every case where it's raised is a lie or an excuse.... as I said, I'm not there to form an opinion on this lady in paticular.
Any way it goes, one way or another she wasn't a good choice for parenthood. While many consider me insane, with the current population levels, it's things like this that make me favor a policy of forced reversible sterilization for all humans, and people having to apply to the goverment to prove themselves capable of raising children. I HATE big goverment in general, and this is about as big as big can get, but considering global overpopulation I think it's nessicary, and reducing the chances of things like this happening until we have enough living space (from space exploration or whatever) is a nice fringe benefit.
....
