The Anatomy of Violence (57 page)

This in turn leads to a broader and perhaps more troubling question. If you agree that Mr. Oft was not responsible for his actions because of his orbitofrontal tumor, what judgment would you render on someone who committed the same act as Mr. Oft but, rather than having a clearly visible tumor, had a subtle prefrontal pathology with a neurodevelopmental origin that was hard to see visually from a PET scan? Because such a pathology consists of a slowly evolving
maldevelopment of this self-control region, there is no rapid switching from
brain abnormality to behavioral abnormality. An individual with this kind of pathology lacks self-control from an early age and is always viewed by those around him as a “bad egg.” He will grow up to be your archetypal evil monster. How should we view him with respect to responsibility? If you cut Mr. Oft some slack, why not individuals like that? And if, on further reflection, you would not cut them some slack, would their case make you feel
differently about how you view Mr. Oft?

Regardless of this latter issue, you might view Mr. Oft as not responsible not just because his tumor “caused” his pedophilia, but also because the tumor could be resected and return him to normality. He could be quickly and convincingly treated, unlike most offenders with more subtle brain impairment. His treatability is making you think differently about his culpability—it’s altering your moral evaluation of his act. And yet you would view today’s untreatable offenders with volume reductions in their prefrontal cortex and amygdala as more responsible and worthy of punishment? How could we ethically condone such a difference in our evaluation? Today’s brain-impaired offenders cannot help the fact that we cannot currently reverse that brain impairment in the way we could with Mr. Oft. Would we call that difference in our opinion “justice”?

Perhaps the majority of you may agree that Mr. Oft was not responsible for his pedophilia. Some will disagree. All I will say for now is that currently the law holds him responsible, standing almost agnosticly to neurocriminology. But what does the future hold for the application of neurocriminology to the law?
Stephen Morse has argued that severe
psychopaths just do not get the point of
morality—just as Mr. Oft could not when questioned by his wife. They are blind to moral concerns and have no capacity for conscience. As such he believes they should be excused from crimes that violate the moral rights of others in society.
³⁸

If we were to agree with this leading expert in criminal responsibility, might there be some basis for applying a similar line of thinking to
Mr. Oft? Should the law be changed in the light of what we are learning not just in a case like Mr. Oft, not just in severe psychopaths, but also in recidivistic violent offenders who also lack this moral sense and feeling of what is right and wrong? And yet we have seen in
chapter 5
there is initial evidence for a neurobiological basis to even
white-collar crime. Will there come a day when the
Bernie Madoffs of the world plead that it’s not their fault—that they were just as biologically predisposed to white-collar crime as Mr. Oft was predisposed to pedophilia?

This issue on the future applications of
neurocriminology brings us to the final chapter, where I will give you my own guarded perspective not just on this issue, but also on other societal values that may have to be reevaluated in the new light of neurocriminology. What does the future hold for us?

Can you remember
Kip Kinkel? Probably not. He’s easily forgotten amid all the other mass killers in America and elsewhere.

You certainly won’t recall
Howard Unruh, who shot thirteen people in New Jersey in 1949. I doubt you’ll recall the tragic
murder of sixteen Scottish
primary-school children in 1996. You’ve probably never heard of
One Goh, the Korean-American who killed seven people at his
Christian college in Oakland, California, in April 2012. You might remember the twelve students and one teacher killed in
Columbine
High School by
Eric Harris and
Dylan Klebold—or
Seung-Hui Cho, the Korean-American who killed thirty-two at
Virginia Tech in 2007. You’ll very likely recall James Holmes killing twelve people during the midnight showing of
The
Dark Knight Rises
. It may be some time before you forget
Adam Lanza’s gunning down of twenty schoolchildren at
Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012. But the rest become a blur—it’s really hard to keep track of them all, and they go back a long way. They are outrageous and completely unacceptable in any society. But heinous killings are not going to go away—unless we take fairly radical steps.

It’s in this context that I want to explore with you the possible directions neurocriminological knowledge may take us in the future—for better or for worse—in preventing these and other tragedies. I want to explore how a
public-health approach to violence can help create
a healthier future for us all. But before we begin our exchange of perspectives, I must first refresh your memory on Kip.

Kip
Kinkel was a fifteen-year-old schoolboy in Springfield, Oregon, and he loved guns. That’s not uncommon, especially in the rural American Northwest. So he was delighted when his father, Bill, bought him a 9-mm
Glock semiautomatic handgun. Bill bought it because he had difficulty connecting with his son, and he thought maybe a gun would help. He’d already given Kip a .22 rifle, and enrolled him in gun-safety courses so that his son could safely channel his enthusiasm for firearms. Kids like Glocks because they are easy to fire, lightweight, and stylish. But Bill never thought Kip would bring a gun to school. Kip was caught with a loaded, stolen handgun in his locker. In England it’s cell phones that bother teachers in the classroom. In the United States it’s guns. Kip was suspended from school and faced expulsion.

His parents were absolutely distraught. Both Bill and his wife were highly respected teachers in their middle-class community, and now their son had been arrested on a felony charge. Bill collected Kip from the Springfield Police Station, where he had been booked, and they drove together to their secluded rural home. It was the middle of the afternoon. Bill sat at the kitchen counter drinking coffee, no doubt contemplating what could be done for Kip, wondering what on earth would happen next with his son.

What happened next was that Kip delivered a single bullet to the back of Bill’s head, behind his right ear, using a rifle that he had retrieved from his bedroom. Kip then waited anxiously for about two hours for his mother, Faith, to come home from work.
¹
As she walked into the house Kip first told her that he loved her. Just as Adam Lanza shot his mother four times in the face before
killing twenty schoolchildren, Kip fired two bullets into the back of his own mother’s head. But she was still alive. So Kip fired three bullets into her face, one into her forehead above her left eye, one through her left cheek, and one close up in the center of her forehead. Yet she still moved. Kip put the sixth and final bullet into her heart.

Kip then put the theme song from the 1996 movie
Romeo and Juliet
, which had starred Leonardo DiCaprio, onto continuous play. He had watched this classic romantic tragedy in his English class. The next morning, on May 21, 1998, he drove to his high school dressed in a trench coat and armed with an arsenal of weapons. Kip walked into the cafeteria of Thurston High, where 150 students were having
breakfast. Shooting from the hip with his semiautomatic rifle he got off forty-eight rounds in one minute and very quickly killed one teenager and wounded twenty-six others. One of those wounded later died at the hospital. He would have killed more, but as he was reloading, a wounded member of the high school wrestling team, enraged that his girlfriend had been shot, tackled him. Kip quickly got out his
Glock and managed to fire just one more round before six other students fought him down to the ground. He was arrested and charged with four counts of aggravated
murder and twenty-six counts of attempted murder.
²

Kip’s attorneys had a dilemma on their hands. They could have entered an NGRI plea—not
guilty by reason of
insanity—because there was evidence that Kip was
mentally ill. Yet a jury might not easily accept going soft on a wayward teenager who had killed so many in cold blood.

Instead, the defense decided to cut a deal with the prosecution: Kip would plead guilty to murder and attempted murder. But while he normally would receive twenty-five years for each of the four murders, the prosecution agreed to recommend that the sentences run concurrently instead of consecutively. That way he would get a maximum of twenty-five years. Thus, with the support of the prosecution, Kip could be out at the age of forty. The defense had found the presiding judge,
Jack Mattison, to be fair, reasonable, and rational. They were confident about their case. Because Kip pleaded guilty there was a six-day hearing at Lane County Circuit Court instead of a trial by jury.

Speaking for the defense of Kip Kinkel was
Richard Konkol, the chair of pediatric neurology at Kaiser Permanente and also adjunct professor in neurology and professor of pediatrics at
Oregon Health & Science University. Konkol had conducted a functional
brain scan on Kinkel and documented poor functioning in several areas of the brain.
³
Konkol convincingly pointed out that the most striking dysfunction were “holes” that appeared in the
ventral or underside of the prefrontal cortex. These were not physical holes but areas of poorer functioning.
⁴
Both sides of the
orbitofrontal cortex showed much-reduced functioning, but the right orbitofrontal cortex was particularly impaired.

Dr. Konkol buttressed the brain-scan findings with his own neurological examination of Kinkel, which revealed multiple signs of neurological disorder. His examination included tests of cranial nerve functioning, neuromotor functioning, tone and muscle functioning, reflexes, sensory functions, and neurocognitive functioning. He testified
that the neurological findings concurred with the imaging findings of
frontal and temporal lobe abnormalities, and argued that the impairment was neurodevelopmental in nature. The prosecution elected not to cross-examine Dr. Konkol.

Psychiatric experts also testified for the defense. Kip had suffered from
depression the year before the
killings and had had nine sessions with a therapist. His mother,
Faith, had been concerned with his temper and obsessive interest in guns, knives, and explosives. He also had police reports for shoplifting and throwing a rock at a car from an overpass. The therapy focused on depression and anger
management. After the sixth session he was put on
Prozac. Prozac worked so well in lifting Kip’s depression and emotional problems that after three months his therapist, his mother, and Kip jointly decided he could be taken off it. That may have been a well-meaning mistake.

It was after the seventh therapy session that
Bill bought his son the
Glock semiautomatic. In hindsight, it sounds like a really irresponsible thing to do, but Bill was a sensible and rational man who was desperately trying to improve the strained relationship he had with his son. He was careful to create very strict operational guidelines for its use and storage. This cherished parental present was to become one of the guns that Kip took to school to execute his murderous plan.

Several psychiatrists testified that Kip was suffering from
paranoid
schizophrenia at the time of the homicides and that he heard
voices resulting in
command
hallucinations. One voice told him to “Shoot him!” when he had arrived back home with his father. Another voice said “Go to school and kill everybody. Look what you’ve already done” after he had killed his father.
⁵

It was also revealed by psychiatrists that Kip suffered from
delusions. He believed
China was going to invade the United States, and in preparation he kept explosives under the house. Disney was going to take over the world, with Mickey Mouse’s effigy stamped on the new world’s currency. Experts testified about his
learning disability, particularly with respect to reading and spelling. Kip was
dyslexic. He first started hearing a voice when he was eleven, a voice that had told him, “You are a stupid piece of shit. You aren’t worth anything.” Another psychiatrist documented that there were multiple cases of
mental illness in Kip’s family history, including schizophrenia.

The prosecution took only four hours to present its case. It did not contest any of the psychiatric and neurological evidence. It was going
to be up to the judge to agree or disagree with the prosecution’s and the defense’s joint recommendation that the
sentences should run concurrently for a total of twenty-five years.

When Judge
Mattison rendered his judgment, his reference point was a change to the constitution of Oregon two years earlier, which had placed the rationale of punishment away from reforming the individual and toward both the
protection of society and also personal responsibility. In this context he
argued:

On November 10, 1998, he sentenced Kip to 111 years in prison without the possibility of parole. Kinkel became the first juvenile to serve a
life sentence in the state of Oregon. He could never be free again.

We now move into the
future. We pluck the same Kip from 1993 and skip him forty years ahead in time to 2039. He is now a ten-year-old schoolboy, five years before the fateful killings. A new school screening program has identified him as a potential killer. He obtains residential state-of-the-art treatment that successfully tackles the neurodevelopmental factors placing him at risk for future violence. He is later released and lives out a normal life as a crime-free citizen and functional father. Bill and Faith become doting grandparents, two other children live out their lives instead of dying a harrowing death, and twenty-five more people are no longer life-scarred victims of deadly assault.