were hospitalized 68 percent of the time and imprisoned 27 percent of the time, fathers convicted of killing their children were sentenced to prison or executed 72 percent of the time and hospitalized only 14 percent of the time.”
The link doesn’t take you to Resnick’s study supporting the statistics, but rather to a CBS News article on Resnick’s testimony in the Yates case which neither presents nor defends any statistics whatsoever. The link only gives the appearance that Ms. Lithwick is linking her source for the stats. Furthermore, these statistics only show that the courts can be more sympathetic for filicidal mothers than for their male counterparts. Neither they, nor any of the other statistics in the article go to the question of whether Yates is ‘insane’.
Ms. Lithwick asks: “While it may once have been true that women were the sole—and often frustrated—caregivers of small children, mothers now work, yet they don't kill their colleagues; they kill their babies. Why?” This is just silly. If I wanted to be flip I might suggest that Ms. Lithwick has never been around children much. But frankly, I suspect that it’s just a hell of a lot easier to kill an infant or child than it is to kill another adult.
Finally, note that in the CBS News article it does state that: “.. Yates confessed to killing her kids and even prosecutors concede that she was mentally ill back then.”
I’ll leave this with one last thought: No one ever pleads permanent insanity, do they?
As everyone who uses Windows 98 and Internet Explorer 5.5 is surely aware, Microsoft has announced this morning [now yesterday] that Internet Explorer 6 is now available for download for users of Windows 98. Frankly, considering the number of problems I’ve been experiencing with the internet in the last few days, and I know I’ve been comparatively lucky, all I need is another batch of bugs. I think I’ll ride with IE 5.5 until I hear some reviews on the new product.
Via Steve Den Beste, this is just plain unbelievable:
Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida, has been notified this week that the Immigration and Naturalization Service has approved applications for student visas for Mohamed Atta, and Marwan Al-Shehhi.
Approved them? OK, I guess they can start their flight training now..
In case anyone could possibly have forgotten, Atta and Al-Shehhi trained at Huffman in July 2000 and were aboard separate flights that struck the towers of the World Trade Center.
This sounds like a disgruntled INS employee trying to make trouble for the agency. If it’s not a disgruntled employee There Had Better Be Big Trouble.