Into the Darklands and Beyond: Unveiling the Predators Among Us by Nigel Latta

Author:Nigel Latta [Latta, Nigel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Crime, Psychology, Psychopathy, True Crime
ISBN: 9781869506698
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2010-08-01T12:00:00+00:00

It didn’t bother me at first, but as time went on it started to grate on me more and more; everybody called him ‘the Pizza Man’.

The trial had been going for just over four weeks, and I’d been coming and going, mostly towards the end of the day, monitoring how the young accused were doing. My observations of them in court indicated they were handling it about as well you could expect. Mostly they just looked bored.

The older members of the group paid attention to almost everything, but the younger ones pretty much appeared to be doodling on paper the whole time. The spread of attentional ability was distributed much as I would have expected with the oldest doing the best and then panning down to what appeared to be only marginal ability for the younger members.

As the trial progressed I suggested to the court that I conduct less frequent interviews since there weren’t any pressing issues and this would mean a faster conclusion to the trial.

In fact, about the only thing that really bothered me was the constant referral to Michael Choy as ‘the Pizza Man’. Pretty much everybody did it. Now, I can understand at one level that the reason for this was to reduce confusion because there were a lot of names. From this point of view it made sense since everyone knew that Michael was the Pizza Man. Except it just kept grating away at me. It was so impersonal.

I sat in court listening to them talk about him like that, and wondered how I would feel about that if it were my own son. I wondered how it must be for Michael’s family to hear him referred to in that way. He wasn’t ‘the Pizza Man’ to them.

Then I looked over at the defendants, most of them still doodling, and the clinician in me strained at the leash. I didn’t want them to hear Michael Choy referred to in that way. They had depersonalised him when they attacked him, and I didn’t feel comfortable with him still being depersonalised. The clinician in me wanted those young people to be confronted that this was a real person they had killed. I wanted them to hear his name. I wanted them to think about the fact that they hadn’t killed a ‘Pizza Man’, they had killed Michael Choy.

At one point I looked around the courtroom trying to decide who I could raise the matter with, but there wasn’t really anyone. None of the defence lawyers would want to personalise the victim more. I didn’t have any form of contract with the Crown lawyers, and it would have been inappropriate in the extreme for me to raise it with the Judge. Essentially it was none of my business.

Instead I reminded myself that the trial wasn’t concerned with accountability in the way I might be. The clinician in me wanted to sit all those kids down in a quiet room and make them understand what they’d done. Criminal trials aren’t about that, though, criminal trials are about lawyers and legal arguments.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.