The Devil Made Me Do It: Pleading the Insanity Defense or How to Get Away with Murder

****Disclaimer: if you are a complete moron, this is a comedy article. Please do not commit murder, and if you do, don’t tell the cops that Dragon told you how. And clear your browser cache.****

You can’t simply kill your enemies and claim to be cleansing the world of demons. Park Dietz, or an even funnier-looking forensic psychologist, will explain that you are a liar. The McNaughton defense is based on whether you comprehend the wrongness of your actions. Consider Jeffrey Dahmer, who was obviously batshit crazy, but still knew it was wrong to drill holes in his lovers' heads. Dietz saw that Dahmer got drunk to overcome his guilt. Also, Dahmer lied to the cops prior to his arrest. Lying to the cops is a sure sign you know you’re breaking the law. If you want to plead insanity, you’ve got to tell the truth about your actions. In this scenario, the only thing you can lie about is your insanity.

But it’s not even so simple as that. If you make 200k a year, own a big house, lead a glamorous life, and off your annoying mother-in-law, it’s going to be pretty hard to argue that you really believed she was an alien. You’ve got to set up your insanity defense in advance. The first thing to do, if you want to get away with it, is worry friends, family, and coworkers.

Early stage schizophrenia is simple to emulate. Laugh at inappropriate times, like funerals and board meetings, or cry at inappropriate times. Deny your actions when accosted. Get paranoid for no reason and make groundless accusations of those around you. Allude to vague suspicions that you are being watched or have enemies. Don’t overdo it. Act generally normal and just bust out with these little personality tics a few times a week. You don’t want to end up committed before you commit your big crime. You want people to have nagging worries in the back of their heads, stuff they can tearfully recall at your trial, adding, “If only we had recognized the signs.”

Step two is a little crime. A really little crime. Something likely to make News of the Weird and set people to nervous laughter, something even the judge will agree to cover up. For instance, obtain a small dead animal. Remove your clothes. Walk naked through a public place clutching your small, dead animal. You will be arrested. Provided you are not rushing a fraternity or a member of Greenpeace or PETA, you will be declared mentally ill. Take it further by insisting your dead animal is a living child, or an accordion, or a letter of commendation from the president, and refuse to relinquish it until you are granted protection from the Pope, or Steven Spielberg, or your trash collector.

You will be rewarded with court-ordered psychiatric treatment. It’s free, and it’s likely to be a short stint! The downside is those psychotropic drugs really slow you down, and your state mental health facility is not the Bellagio. The food is crap and you have to share a room. But no one said it would be easy. You’re on the right track. The moment you start taking anti-psychotic medication, drop the schizophrenia act. Admit you were out of your head. Claim you’ve been under a lot of stress and you just want your life back. Agree with everything the doctors say. Soon, you will be free, at which time you can flush your meds down the toilet.

Now you are ready to commit a real crime. Don’t overthink. Premeditated murder does not result in a verdict of insanity. Careful planning indicates sanity. It’s got to appear spur-of-the-moment. Consider common household implements as weapons. Fit murder into the routine of your life.

Do not, at any time, act surreptitiously. If you are found to be hiding anything, you’re disqualified. If the jury knows you bought a new hammer and hid it on your boss’s bookcase, you can’t pretend something came over you just before you bash his head in after hours. You’re better off bludgeoning him with his own Blackberry during your weekly sit-down in a glass-walled conference room. Smile at your coworkers as you do so. If you have to drown your kids, do it in the bathtub with your cousin downstairs. Don’t lock them in a station wagon and push it into the lake in the middle of the night and claim, "A black guy did it." Not only will you look like a cold-blooded killer, you’ll look like a racist. The jury will not sympathize.

Finally, let’s say you’ve committed the act. Don’t cover it up! This is the most important part. If you cover it up, this is evidence that you knew it was wrong. The best thing you can do is stay with the body of your victim until the police arrive. Confess immediately, with a big smile. Bonus points if you do the deed in front of a cop. That makes you look really insane

Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog!

From the gloriously huge forehead of Joss Whedon comes yet another wonderous puff of joy sure to be ignored by the crusty powers that be. Starring Neil Patrick Harris as the almost evil 'Dr. Horrible' and Nathan Fillion as his dashing nemesis 'Captain Hammer'... this Super Hero Musical is a must see, and if you are a cheapass then hurry and watch it now while it's still free! Joss is offering the 3 part series free until Sunday July 20th at midnight.

Luckily it will still be available after that for $3.99 over at iTunes... and if you enjoy the series then I urge you to buy it so that Joss can toss some change to all the people who helped put it together.

Here's to hoping we see more tales of Dr Horrible's almost evil adventures down the road!

Let the process begin

Isn't it funny, the stories that manage to miss the national news? Like, executive abuses that you won't hear about on Fox News. Like 9 Republicans voting for impeachment and 10 abstaining and the articles of impeachment being sent to Judiciary, which happened Tuesday.

Pass it on.

New Flash: Pot Is Not Killing Our Children

Time Magazine reports that many Americans smoke pot despite decades of prohibition and an authoritarian regime that spends money to investigate, arrest, try, and incarcerate citizens who choose to get high in a way that is not sanctioned by the government. This is some hard-hitting investigative journalism! It's right up there with the revelation that many teenagers have sex after receiving abstinence-only education.

Seriously, though, it's about what I expect from a national newsertainment media outlet. They can't publish a chart that puts alcohol, cigarettes, caffeine, and weed on one page and debates their relative merits and disadvantages. (Which is most likely to kill you? Which is most likely to sicken you? Which is most likely to get you addicted? Hint: not weed.) It's just plain un-American to suggest that we have federal laws based on corporate interests. But they can look at the cultural climate and reflect that many Americans recognize the hypocrisy of our drug laws and the benign nature of a plant whose medicinal property humans have recognized and exploited for thousands of years.

This article includes a few sidebars attesting to the continual paradoxes generated by a drug policy written in an alternate reality. (You know--the one where the profits of tobacco companies mitigate the dangers of the product while the nature of marijuana to grow in a ditch by the side of the road and cause users to question reality transforms a harmless plant into a public health menace). My favorite was this article by MD Scott Haig, who reports, "I have yet to see a patient whose health was harmed by smoking marijuana, but I have treated people seriously hurt by the drug's illegality."

This is the unvarnished truth. American resources are criminally wasted in the war on marijuana. Legalization would eradicate the drug's pernicious influence. It would reduce cross-border traffic, since no American would pay extra to import a product from Mexico if they could cultivate it in their window box. It would separate the influence of organized crime, since gangs don't sell legal and plentiful products. It would relieve the crowded courts and prison system and allow resources to be used to stop crime (i.e. behaviors with victims, wherein someone, somehow, is harmed).

Renowned author Michael Pollan, in The Botany of Desire explains that, while he did feel some degree of paranoia smoking pot in America, that sensation disappeared in Amsterdam, when he longer had any reason to believe that his behavior might land him in jail. Recent studies have linked marijuana use among teens to depression. Yes! Let's examine this. Since anyone who has ever taken a statistics class is aware that correlation does not imply causality, we can dissect the argument that pot makes you sad and perhaps accept that depressed people find that pot actually makes them feel better. Seriously! For many people, it works better than Paxil, Zoloft, and all of the other legal mind-altering substances prescribed by the slaves of the pharmaceutical companies. Isn't that nice? A natural remedy to a widespread problem that individuals can use as needed, rather than on a regular basis that leads to a terrible, painful-to-break addiction, like SSRIs.

Steady the Dead Ready

More choice morsels from my personal blog:

Been feeling so breathless lately, as if I have dirt in my lungs and the worms living in the dirt are digging into the soft spongy tissue in search of the things they can't have and never will; they search for things like the stars, like kisses, like love. What's this?! My body has sloughed off its arms, my legs have atrophied and fused together, my eyes are rolled into the back of my head, all my teeth have fallen out, and my skin has turned translucent, producing a thick slime. I am a worm! No one will want me now! I am typing with only the tip of my tail though I'm completely blind. Not to brag, but aren't I doing a good job? Whoa... I am now a creature not to be loved, but to be loathed! Someone give me a rotten fruit, please! Nom nom nom nom... I die. Now I am dirt! Who loves dirt, but more worms! Yay, I feel loved. The End.

Honestly now, what is up with this California HEAT? It's like bloody fucking summer. We already had one of those last year! And what about gravity, what's going on there? Has the Sun suddenly exploded and didn't tell anyone? Wouldn't that be one awesome sight? Our little pea-sized Sun has suddenly grown all up, to Mr. Red Giant, it brings tears to my squinting eyes as our star expands rapidly into the size of a basketball and keeps on going. The gas explosion comes rushing towards us at a million miles a minute. Or is it a million miles a second? Anyway, it gets real hot real fast, all the water in our bodies boil away as all our hair disintegrates in the massive heat pulses, and if we're lucky our eyeballs will expire with a loud satisfying "Pop!" I don't know about the rest of you, but I plan on leaving a very nice looking set of skeleton behind; none of this grasping-my-face-in-open-mouthed-horror bullshit. I'll wear a nice pair of shades, raise my tiny fists up towards the cloudless red skies, the atmosphere all afire and raining down islands of destruction, and I'll laugh.

Yeah, you motherfucking Sun, bring that shit.

"Top" Stories

This is what's wrong with America today. Among other things.



Attractive woman undergoes parturition! (Ceaseless violence worldwide continues uneventfully!)

Damn you, senseless media aggregator! Once again you have revealed to me the hopeless truth.

Welcome to the New Reality! (Egress this way)

As the tide turns on our current lame duck administration, you know the lies and secrets (the ones they didn't manage to shred or delete, anyway) are going to keep piling up. Like this fresh news article detailing further abuse from the desk of Emperor Cheney. In this case, the New (soon to be old, one hopes) Reality dictates that we can change the laws of science by merely pretending they don't exist! That's right, folks! Climate change is reversible through denial. Stick a stooge in a high post at NASA and grab your Sharpie whenever some facts slip though the cracks. The planet isn't getting warmer! The polar ice caps aren't melting! Sea level cities aren't flooding! Tornadoes and hurricanes aren't becoming more prevalent and powerful! The Southwest no longer suffers from drought! It's that easy, people.

That's kind of the major trope of the Bush years: you can accomplish anything through denial. American support of the young Osama Bin Laden? Deny! Never happened? Lack of connection between Saddam Hussein and anything remotely having to do with a threat to America? Deny! Never happened! Party manipulation and machination that put an unqualified pawn in the Oval Office for the purpose of stomping on the Bill of Rights, instigating war, and pumping cash into the military-industrial complex? Deny! Never happened!

In this case, if climate change were a reality, that would mean people who make their money by contributing to climate change (i.e. the oil industry) might be forced to stop polluting. That would be a big problem. For Dick Cheney's friends. But Dick Cheney has a magical power. He can point to any member of his staff and say, "Make this information go away." Poof! Now that he has mystically reversed climate change, there's no problem. For Dick Cheney's friends.