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Giving Evil the Eye
Forensic pyschiatrist Michael Welner with his Depravity Scale, which he believes would help juries label as either sadistic or sick the actions of criminals.
(Helayne Seidman - For The Washington Post)
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Welner's leading example of our confusion over evil and depravity is the case of Charles Reddish. He is a New Jersey man who in 1995 tied up his girlfriend and her teenage daughter. He then put a sheet over the daughter's head and killed the girlfriend with an ax. Then he took the child upstairs and raped her.
The jury convicted him of the murder and rape. But, after the judge created a very narrow standard of what is heinous in the jury instructions, they found that killing a mother with 24 blows from an ax in front of her child was not depraved. No worse than any ordinary murder.
"You can't infer any intent to inflict torture," said the foreman.
* * *
And Ivan Teleguz? Was he "depraved"?
Yes, said the jury -- and the Virginia Supreme Court.
There were many elements that the appellate court affirmed as depraved -- planning the murder to avoid supporting his own child; directing the killing to take place without regard to the child's presence; and, most particularly, directing the killers to cut Sipe's throat.
"Teleguz's specific directions for the manner in which Sipe was to be murdered are evidence of his depravity of mind," the court ruled. "The facts in this case support a finding of such depravity of mind and thus satisfy the statutory predicate of vileness."
Ivan Teleguz is on death row.
What is evil? Who can say?
