Case Study 1: Who Is the Victim?

Circle of Abuse abstract art

Freedom and Determinism
Case Study 1: Who Is the Victim?
Sophistry and Illusion

In May 2006, Jerry Buck Inman raped and murdered Tiffany Marie Souers in her apartment. Souers was a 20-year-old engineering student at Clemson University in South Carolina. Inman, a registered sex offender, spent 18 years in jail for rapes that he committed while he was a teenager. He raped and murdered Souers just nine months after his release from jail. Inman pleaded guilty to the rape of Souers and requested the death penalty. He wants to die for his crimes and claims to be overwhelmed by feelings of guilt and shame.

But Inman’s attorney, Jim Bannister, argued that capital punishment would be unfair:

“He said Inman ‘came into this world impaired to start with,’ living in a home where his father molested him and his mother suffered from mental illness…’What is it about a man’s background that could put him in a position to be capable of such a horrendous and unthinkable crime?’ Bannister asked Circuit Court Judge Edward Miller, who will decide Inman’s fate.” (MSNBC)

Suppose that Bannister could provide us with overwhelming evidence that Inman was sexually and emotionally abused as a child. How would this evidence influence our evaluation of him? Would we still view him as a free and responsible agent? Or would we instead view him as the victim and inevitable consequence of his abusive past? Are his parents also partly to blame for the murder of Tiffany Marie Souers?

Source:

MSNBC: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26613549/

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One Response to “Case Study 1: Who Is the Victim?”

Commented on November 3rd, 2008 at 5:38 pm by W. M. Hess

That there is a cycle of violence is well established. Numerous authorities have documented the transgressions committed against individuals who in turn transgress. The question here is whether an individual is capable of getting off the merry-go-round, to use a macabre metaphor. Since most abused children do not themselves end up as criminals who commit crimes against others, there must be some sort of escape. What perplexes one here is whether those who commit crimes like Inman ever have the chance to escape.

The essential psychological capacity for escape is empathy, and only those who have experienced empathy can ever develop it in themselves. This takes us to the moment in individual life where one perhaps encounters a person who is willing to express empathy for the distress of the abused individual. Is there a choice of allowing one’s self to experience empathy? Is it a door that one must open? Or, in the case of Inman, did the door never appear? Was the world around him so brutal and uncaring that such a person never appeared?

Here one is left with probability that such a person did appear and that the abused individual chose not to engage with him or her.

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