Do you usually feel sad for most perpetrators of heinous crimes?

[Chan790]

24. Some of them more than others.

For example, I have more sadness for the Unibomber than I have for George Zimmerman. One's a wasted brilliant mind brought low by his psychoses whose responses to a legitimate problem were horrific...the other is a dipshit with a cop fetish who thinks God ordained him to murder an innocent for no good reason whatsoever.

I don't know what to make of Holmes. I'm positive he's nutty as a walnut cake but I really do get the vibe that he did what he did at his most lucid because he simply wants to watch the world burn. I have a hard time having sympathy for someone like that...he's almost certainly going to be brutalized or murdered in jail and I'll probably be more upset if I'm not upset about it when it happens as it bothers me to be that callous as an anti-DP activist. It brings me to the one that really wrenches me and fucks with my head; it's the one that comes closest to your question.

Inevitably, whenever I talk about things like this, I'm forced to confront the case that's closer to me than most others. I knew of the Petits, my brother knew the girls. Dr. Petit was my mom's endocrinologist. It happened one town over from the one I used to work in and two towns from the one I grew up in. I felt personally violated...I had a really hard time with that case because after 15+ years of protesting executions back to when I was 14, it was the first and only time I've ever had to ask myself: "Don't these motherfuckers actually deserve to die?" Ultimately, the answer is no...but to this day I can only reconcile it by considering that life without parole in permanent solitary might actually be worse. There's a reason why the suicide rate for those types of inmates is so high...the sentence is torture. There is something terrible about taking joy in the misery of others, even truly-evil individuals who lack any redemptive quality. Hayes at-least is dumber than wood...Komisarjevsky actively and willingly chose to be a monster, it was his lusting to f**k a 12 year old he saw in the grocery that precipitated the greater crime; a crime he thought about in great depth and strategized in advance of committing it. I cannot conceptualize of a misery that might befall him in this life or whatever afterlife might occur that equals the horror of his crime or the evil needed to commit it.