[O]n learning that her father had just died from the stab wound that she had inflicted upon him, a female parricide of my acquaintance exclaimed, “How could he do this to me!” It was as if, in dying, he were… deliberately trying to mess up her life. She seemed to think that her father might not have bled so torrentially had he tried just a little harder not to do so after she stabbed him in the spleen….
It was Aristotle who said that a man who committed a crime because of intoxication was doubly guilty: both of the crime itself and of bringing about his loss of self-control….
By now, Lemrick Nelson–a man caught holding the knife used to stab Rosenbaum, identified by the victim before he died as the attacker, and placed by witnesses in a crowd of young blacks baying “Get the Jew” at the victim before the killing–probably believes that for someone in a state of drunken excitement to stab another person to death is to be just as innocent of murder as someone who stabs no one to death. It wasn’t me: it was the beer and the people I was with. Here moral irresponsibility hits bottom. [Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal, 5/2/03]
