So in my BIO class this week we had to come up with a response to one of three different questions. The one I chose was picking either the defense or prosecution of a case where a defendant was claiming that his genetics were responsible for the crime. We were to consider things like heritability, environment, quantitative genes and polygenic traits. Most people chose other questions, only one or two people picked this one and they just analyzed things. I went a different route and decided to be creative. I wrote my piece as a prosecution attorney's closing argument in said trial. What do you guys think?
"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, as you listen to the closing arguments you will notice that the defense truly wants you to believe that the rape, mutilation and murder of these three college co-eds was because the defendant inherited "bad genes". They've taken you on a truly astounding genetic journey in their attempt to persuade you that because the defendant shared several unfortunate genetic traits with other famous serial killers - John Wayne Gacy, Ed Gein, and Hannibal the Cannibal to name a few - that he had no *choice* but to brutally rape and torture these women before finally ending their lives so far before their time. But let me posit this to you if I may: if this were true, why didn't his identical twin brother do the same? Their genetics are identical, surely those same traits exist in both brothers. So why has the brother not been brought up on similar charges? I'll tell you why. Because genetics are not responsible for these heinous crimes.
During the course of this trial you have learned that the two brothers were given for adoption to different agencies in different parts of the country in an attempt to prevent them discovering each other. You have also learned that the defendant's brother was adopted by an affluent couple when he was just a baby and was raised as their own. He went to private schools, given the best social and academic opportunities, and is well respected in his community as a leader and citizen, without even so much as a parking ticket. The defendant was not so lucky; a ward of the state he bounced from foster home to foster home, sometimes two or three in a year when he was a teenager. He was constantly in trouble with the authorities with a laundry list of charges brought against him - from petty larceny as a child, to repeated problems with drugs, to aggravated assault with a deadly weapon when he beat his tenth grade biology teacher with a keyboard for suggesting he redo a plagiarized assignment. No, genetics are not to blame for these murders. True, his is a tragic story of a broken system that has failed him time and again, but it is still a story. One that unfortunately came to a sad climax when he decided to take the lives of these three promising young girls. Not because he was genetically predisposed to violence, but because his life was one violent episode after another. Violence begets violence.
In closing, ladies and gentlemen, I ask you not to look upon the defendant as a genetic mutation that needs to be studied and fixed, but rather as the monster he truly is. As you well know, the penalty if he is found guilty of these crimes is death by injection. I want you to look at the faces of the families of this man's victims, look long and hard, and make the correct decision.
Thank you."
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