A Mad Scheme To Kill A Scientist

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-scientist-murder7-2010jan07,0,1907606,full.story

by nodirection • 17 years ago

63 82 17 years ago

dkarl• 17 years ago

They discovered that the scientist had converted his living room into a monitoring station for extra-terrestrial life: Six powerful computers were running a program that analyzed radio signals from outer space.

Not to make light of a tragic story, but I hope no police or news media ever have anything to say about my life.

argv_empty• 17 years ago

I'm inclined to believe it was just SETI@home. After all the other eccentricities they'd described, that seemed rather anticlimactic.

astine2• 17 years ago

Analyzing radio signals from outerspace? What else could it be but S@H? (I wonder if he had an F@H setup in his basement :))

bitwize• 17 years ago

Dear Media,

The A Beautiful Mind guy is real, and he has a name. It's John Nash. You should start using it more often as, movie or no movie, he's a remarkable guy in his own right.

jcl• 17 years ago

Agreed. SETI@home is exactly the sort of thing an engineer would run in the background on a cluster of computers. And a cluster of computers is exactly the sort of thing a guy would have if he were making millions through "investment algorithms".

I suppose he wouldn't have been much better off if he ran Folding@home instead. The article would probably have said something like "Six powerful computers were found analyzing the inner workings of mad cow disease."

Eliezer• 17 years ago

If the media ever report on your life, you will find that it's even worse than you think.

astine2• 17 years ago

Oh, so they just wanted his money. Nothing sensational there.

(Tragic and shameful nonetheless)

philk• 17 years ago

The sensational thing is that they're preying on the mentally ill.

rgrieselhuber• 17 years ago

"Prosecution is also more common thanks to surveillance cameras and other new tools."

A sadly ironic statement, considering the victim's struggles with paranoia.

joeyo• 17 years ago

That reminds me of one of my favorite Onion News videos: Is the government spying on paranoid schizophrenics enough?

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/in_the_know_is_the_gov...

aarongough12• 17 years ago

Personally I think cases like this are a great example of when capital punishment is acceptable.

When a person shows that much contempt for the life and well-being of another human being, they really don't deserve to continue living...

malkia• 17 years ago

Burn the fuckin witch!

Capital punishment is not enough for her...

vaporstun2• 17 years ago

I look at it from a financial standpoint.

When someone does something this vile, we (the people, by the courts) determine that they shall no longer have a right to their life. Whether that be by ending it via capital punishment or by keeping them incarcerated forever, they essentially no longer have a right to their life.

It costs ~$48,000 per year to keep someone incarcerated (at least in MA where I am: http://www.massbar.org/legislative-activities/mba-memo-on-se...)

If a court determines that someone will no longer have a right to their life and their remaining lifespan is, for example, 40 years, we will spend somewhere on the order of $2,000,000 to keep them incarcerated for their lifetime.

Of course, that assumes the value of the dollar is constant (it isn't) and that the price of keeping this murderer in a maximum security prison is the same as the average cost of keeping someone incarcerated. (it isn't)

When we are locking the door and throwing away the key, why not save the $2,000,000 keeping someone alive who we've deemed has no right to life anyway?

Retric2• 17 years ago

When you include the cost of appeals etc we spend more than that (on average) actually killing someone. In the old days of trial > hanging your argument was more reasonable, but we also killed more innocent people back then.

yan2• 17 years ago

If a new method of testing evidence appears and the alleged criminal is cleared of charges, you can let them out of the prison. You can't un-kill them.

edit: I heard of countless cases of young black men being incarcerated for murder in Texas in the 60's with police going quite out of their way to obstruct the justice process.

barrkel4• 17 years ago

Apart from wrongful convictions resulting execution, death penalties are also very expensive, as the costs of due process through all the appeals have to be paid.

RevRal4• 17 years ago

We don't often learn something by killing, and it is barbaric. An ironic reflection of our own lust for blood. But, okay. Sure, it is satisfying since the "bitch has it coming."

Capital punishment is the easy way out for the criminal and the society that reared the criminal. If the criminal is truly guilty, they always get the last laugh. At least in my mind.

We, the taxpayers, front the money to satisfy our blood-lust. And we learn nothing in the end except, for a moment, we can feel the thrill of hooting and hollering over the carcass of an enemy.

aarongough12• 17 years ago

I actually agree with you far more that my original statement shows. That being said I just can't see how keeping someone locked in a cage for the rest of their life is in any way preferable to just killing them.

They are unable to contribute to society while incarcerated, incarceration is not shown to actually help rehabilitate them, and incarceration costs everyone else a lot of money...

On the other hand: if capital punishment is used then it's pretty clear they'll never get the chance to re-offend. And in cases like this where the criminal has done something truly heinous I think that is the biggest plus possible.

aarongough12• 17 years ago

I'm not really sure why people are downmodding this. While RevRal's opinion may fly in the face of the emotions everyone is likely experiencing after reading the article, he still makes a valid point and touches on a subject that I think speaks volumes about our society in general.

baguasquirrel4• 17 years ago

Why should good people have keep watch over these kinds of criminals? Isn't that barbaric?

The time and the labor could be better spent elsewhere. Every guard we hire, every prison we build, is a hospital that couldn't be built, a teacher who couldn't be hired. I feel this is barbaric towards those in need who've done no wrong.

kiba• 17 years ago

I never reared the criminal and have no knowledge of the crime whatsoever. Nor was I old enough to take care of someone. Nor did I encourage the kind of environment that help cause the criminal acts. Nor did I endorse the punishment of death.

It is easy to use "we" to name collective responsibility, but you must also remember that behind each "we" is a group of individuals.

Society does not act, move, and feel, have goals, beliefs, etc. It is a heterogeneous collection of individuals, each with their own belief system, predisposition, history, relationship, and other distinct characteristics.

Society can be more understood as a force, which its sum is greater than its parts. Yet, we also know that society cannot exists without individuals.

Ultimately, responsibility alway lies with the individual(s).

JabavuAdams4• 17 years ago

This is pretty wishy-washy. I think there's a convincing case to be made that all else being equal society would be better off without certain people.

The problem is that the human system that can rid us of those people will necessarily be flawed, and as other have pointed out, you can't un-kill innocents.

barrkel4• 17 years ago

I believe life without parole to both be a worse punishment than death, and one with a small means of reparation in cases of wrongful conviction.

baguasquirrel4• 17 years ago

Yes, but I do not want to live with the knowledge that people like that are allowed to exist in the world. Punishment be damned, eliminate them from the gene pool.

And if you really believed in human dignity, don't you believe that exerting that sort of punishment is not only cruel to the perp, but to the prison guards who have to handle them?

And what of the money we spend on prisons instead of our children? A .45 only costs a few cents.

gcheong• 17 years ago

I tend to go back and forth on this issue, but I would pose the question that if we made it mandatory that everyone had to serve out capital punishment duty (i.e. you get called to pull the trigger, inject the syringe, or whatever and if you refuse you risk punishment by death yourself) as we do for jury duty then would you be willing to do your civic duty? If you are, what does that say about us as a society? Do we go back to the good old days of public hangings and stonings? If not, then what is so different about paying tax dollars to support the killing of someone?

aarongough12• 17 years ago

That's an interesting perspective actually. I'm not sure that I could do that duty in cold blood... If I was affected by the crime personally in some way then obviously it would likely be a different story.

Perhaps we could have a 'jury of executioners'? 12 potential executioners get called at random, the majority of them have to agree that the death sentence is applicable, all while knowing that one of them would be called upon to do the deed at the end...

easp2• 17 years ago

If we are executing enough people that capital punishment duty is actually a meaningful way to acquaint people with the gravity of taking another person's life in the name of justice, then our society is already repugnantly sick and violent. I think we are some distance from that, and I'd rather not move closer.

Furthermore, I think the risk of such an experiment is that we desensitize the population to the taking of human life.

Tuna-Fish• 17 years ago

> When a person shows that much contempt for the life and well-being of another human being, they really don't deserve to continue living..

I agree.

> Personally I think cases like this are a great example of when capital punishment is acceptable.

I disagree. Because we can never have a good enough standard of proof, and since the state is us, when we execute someone innocent, (which has happened, and will happen again), it makes us all murderers who have no right to live.

JabavuAdams4• 17 years ago

That's really not the point.

If you create a system that can execute those who (arguably) deserve to die, you've also created a system that can, and will be used to execute innocent people.

So, how many innocent people is it alright to execute for the (presumed) satisfaction of executing a few monsters?

JabavuAdams4• 17 years ago

It's very important to look at these kinds of issues from a systems perspective. Complex systems have unintended effects. You're not allowed to say "the code will just work after I hit compile". :)

For instance, how sure are you that the government is spending your tax money wisely? How sure are you that a company you invest in isn't engaging in some form of corruption.

When you raise the stakes to killing another human, and in peace-time, at that, you'd better be sure that mistakes are not just unlikely, but impossible. Of course, that's ... impossible.

og1• 17 years ago

"She said Willa Blanc just showed up and said she had a large dog in the trash can, and paid her dad $1,000 to help them burn it," prosecutor Smith said. "They took all night to do it. This was even weirder than we were imagining."

Seriously...why would anyone believe a lie like that? This story makes me angry.

ahi• 17 years ago

A lot of engineers have similar mental health issues, so I'm sure we all know someone like this. It's hard to strike the right balance between respecting their privacy and looking out for them.

dschobel2• 17 years ago

If that's SETI @ Home (as I believe) then in addition to being a "monitoring station for extra-terrestrial life", my living room is also a cryptography lab (PrimeGrid) and a quantum computing and AI laboratory (AQUA@home).

Who knew!

JacobAldridge2• 17 years ago

I guessed it was most likely SETI as well, so hardly another brick in the wall of mental illness. Applying my (ex) journalist nous to the story, however, I think it was only included so they could run this quote in full (my italics) later in the story:

"In her mind, he was perfect," Cox said. "She's tapped out. He has lots of money. He doesn't know anybody. He lives behind closed doors. He's trying to communicate with ET. Who would miss him?"

rsheridan6• 17 years ago

An interesting feature of this story is that the victim's internet friend was the one who reported him missing. 20 years ago, a guy like this would have had no friends at all, and, as the murderer intended, nobody would have noticed that he was gone for a long time.

Maybe she would have even gotten away with it, especially if she had taken the main part of his money, which she did not have time to get, and fled the country.

jcnnghm• 17 years ago

A relative of mine always used to say "just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get me." Perhaps he was right.

Also, given the topic of his research, nuclear weapon design, it doesn't seem too unlikely that government agents would tamper with his vehicle. The article seems to sensationalize a lot about the man. Running SETI@home isn't exactly that strange of a thing to do. Isn't it built into the PS3.

sethg• 17 years ago

There’s a common stereotype that to be “crazy” is to be dangerous, but as stories like this indicate, the mentally ill are more likely to be victims of abuse than perpetrators.

A Mad Scheme To Kill A Scientist

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