Meredith Lowell, 27,has been arrested in a rather bizarre alleged murder plot: to randomly kill a fur wearer. Lowell was charged with soliciting a hit man to shoot a stranger — justifying the hit was akin to liberating people from Nazi concentration camps.
The details of the conspiracy, however, raise serious question about Lowell’s sanity. The FBI set up Lowell after reading a Facebook page Lowell created under the alias Anne Lowery that offered from $830 to $850 for the hit. When an agent contacted her, she said she would pay in jewelry or cash and that the victim should be at least 12 years but “preferably 14 years old or older” outside a library near a playground in her hometown. She added “You need to bring a gun that has a silencer on it and that can be easily concealed in your pants pocket or coat. … If you do not want to risk the possibility of getting caught with a gun before the job, bring a sharp knife that is (at least) 4 inches long, it should be sharp enough to stab someone and/or slit their throat to kill them. I want the person to be dead in less than 2 minutes.” Her ravings include criticism of the new aquarium in Cleveland.
The question is whether the FBI snared a murderer and a mad women. The problem is that states have so limited the insanity defense that Lowell might be effectively barred from using it — as discussed in this column. Ohio is one of the states that curtailed insanity to eliminate many such claims where a person may be able to tell right from wrong. Here is the standard:
R.C. 2901.01(A)(14) — “A person is ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’ relative to a charge of an offense only if
the person proves, in the manner specified in section 2901.05 of the Revised Code (i.e. by a preponderance of the evidence), that at the time of the commission of the offense, the person did not know, as a result of a severe mental disease or defect, the wrongfulness of the person’s acts.”
The standard sets a very low standard for sanity. When a person is fully functional and aware that she committing a crime (such as hiring a hitman) it is hard to make an insane claim despite the views of many doctors that the person is mentally ill. In this case, Lowell’s asking for a child to be knifed in a matter of minutes does not seem to signify a sound mind or even a serious threat.
What do you think?
Source: CNN
Print the photo on 8 1/2 x 11 inch paper, frame same, hang on the door at Halloween and you wont have to answer the door to give out candy. Hope she doesnt have a dog.
Anybody here? Hope so because here comes an off-topic item. Old, but still highly urgent.
Hope others are still reading because now am gonna go off-topic with something worth everyone’s personal attention. JC at the Iran thread asked for it. I think it everybody that eats, breathes and hope that their children will too, should know about this. The EU parliament asked him to inform them. So they judged it important.
How it went after that I don’t know.
TRUTH ABOUT MONSANTO AND OUR FOOD AS HIDDEN BY AGRIC. SEC.
http://republicbroadcasting.org/?p=13739
All the man writing to the Sec for Agriculture was asking for was to not take away “guard zones” around RoundUP alfalfa, he wanted more study time.
He had the responsibility to chair the FDA committee for detecting and countering plant and animal diseases as it applys to our food supply. He identified the grave problem with a microfungus linked to miscarriaging in first time breed heifers who fed on RoundUp alfalfa. He had other evidence of the negative effects of RoundUp noted in studies over several years: appearance and overgrowth of aggressive new microorganisms, reduction in production in small cereal grains. etc etc.
It’s all there: There should have been a storm, but after brief media notice it disappeared. Dr Huber who wrote the letter was later invited to the EU parliament to present his findings re GMO and Roundup. He has 20 years of studiying glyphosat the main ingredient in RoundUp and 35 studying agricultural plant diseases.
Read it if you want to know how you are fed.
He summarized his own opinion by saying he thinks we are at the tipping point as to a viable food chain. Let’s hope we have time.
The facts he reviewed in more scientific tone, and am sure he is not inclined to hyperbole. They are plentiful and most based on FDA statistics and studies, etc.
She is a neoCon who overheard someone say a foreigner is about. DHS tells us to report any such activity, especially if they pay cash for coffee at an internet cafe.
The neoCon lady did not understand that “furrener” was what the informant thought was said.
Furreners must be eradicated.
But how are we going to do that if we can’t do it with our votes?
@Tony C. – You are correct, nothing confirmed in original article, or checking comments.
Best comment seen, “Poor thing – who looks for a hitman on Facebook? Everyone knows you go to Craigslist!”
P.S. Who says she is a vegan? I don’t see that in the article. My wife and daughter are anti-fur, but they eat burgers, pork, chicken, turkey and eggs.
@Gene: Incarcerate them, kindly. To me at least, most of the objective of incarceration is to separate people that cannot control themselves from the society of people that can. I know most people think of prison as a punishment but I do not think it need be punishing to be a deterrent; I would much prefer that incarceration be just a restriction on interacting freely when one has demonstrated an inability to interact freely without causing others harm.
For murderers, I think that should be permanent, for others, I think it is appropriate, after some time in jail, to test if the threat of jail will help them control themselves: If not, then their incarceration must become progressively longer, until it is permanent.
This woman has proven she cannot interact freely without be a lethal threat to others, she needs to be incarcerated with no chance of escape, but we do not have to be cruel about it. I tend to think there should not be such a thing as an insanity defense; I think all criminals should serve their time in a safe environment that prevents violent or sexual physical interaction, they should all get mental health care because, to a fair approximation, they all have at least self-control problems, and they should all be required to pass a psych evaluation before being released into the population. If ever. Some people really just cannot control themselves and never will.
This is the problem with inasnity being a legal concept. The science of predicting what psychotic people will do is flawed but identifying someone who needs treatment like this woman is not exactly difficult. Having her rot in jail where she’s likely to get poor psychiatric care, serves no one’s interest.
It’s a valid concern and question, Mike. What to do with the criminally insane? The scientist in me says that the greatest benefit would come from studying and experimenting on them to find cures and prevent their sort of aberrant behavior in the future, the humanitarian in me says that’s got the potential for going way to far and straying into the realm of cruelty and the logician in me knows that the penal system doesn’t help them and the medical system doesn’t provide just outcomes for victims but that leaves no other option than to warehouse them which is materially not much different than the current penal/medical solutions employed although it might remove some of the exacerbating factors of the penal solution. It’s really a damned if you do damned if you don’t kind of scenario. Makes you wish Morton would have kept his fork to himself.
@Tony C. – How apropos for a vegan; another “eats shoots and leaves” misunderstanding.
Gene, that link was funny. The PETA folks I have run into are as extremist as any group you could find anywhere.
I recall several years ago, they “liberated” a large number of animals from a laboratory. As I recall, they were either Chinchillas or Mink. The critters did what came naturally and devastated the local ecosystem, including birds and other small animals, including domestic animals. Seems that members of the rodent and weasel families of animals are predators, a simple fact the PETA folks chose to overlook. So much for animal rights.
I don’t know how it is there, but here the reaction to setting mentally illl “free” after a few months or years of treatment has irritated and become a profile issue, which hasn’t changed the norm as far as I know.
I suspect the line “I want the person to be dead in less than 2 minutes” was with respect to the instant of attack, not immediately on the phone. In other words, she did not want the person to suffer longer than two minutes.
Which is a little bit less crazy than demanding a hit man on the phone find somebody to kill within two minutes.
And to think all the nutjobs are in Texas or Florida or….wait it is the nutjobs state for some reason.. Or is that buckeye……
Yet she was sane enough to know she couldn’t do it and thus needed to hire someone. Interesting rationalization.
And soliciting the services of another would infer she knows the potential consequences of being caught.
Wonder if the FBI agent had to swear to being a vegan?
The ranting over the aquarium is not too far off, as I’m sure she prefers her piscine bretheren and sisteren to be “free range”
Oh yeah, absolutely culpable.
“She added “You need to bring a gun that has a silencer on it and that can be easily concealed in your pants pocket or coat. … If you do not want to risk the possibility of getting caught with a gun before the job, bring a sharp knife that is (at least) 4 inches long, it should be sharp enough to stab someone and/or slit their throat to kill them. I want the person to be dead in less than 2 minutes.”
**************************
Soliciting for agents, planning the crime, determining the means, establishing the timing, plotting the escape — crazy but culpable, in my view.
Mespo,
Yes she is culpable and certainly requires being locked up someplace.The problem is that we don’t have enough understanding of human insanity to know just how to treat people like this. Prison isn’t the answer, but then neither are mental institutions for the criminally insane, as they are now
constituted. Most functioning psychotics, sociopaths and narcissists comprehend what society deems to be “right and wrong” but do not have the interest, or the psychic means to adhere to certain rules. What do we do with them? Damned if I know and its my field of knowledge.
Yep. Crazy as a bed bug.
In a nutshell the woman fits my idea of crazy. She is so obsessed with the killing of animals that she is willing to kill a random human in protest. I understand that the legal definition of insanity is quite narrow. In my mind that narrowness is a mistake. To deal with the problems of insanity, one must first understand the parameters. A really insane person can be quite rational on one level, but obsessively focused on an insane solution to that which angers them on another level. The human personality is quite complex, unfortunately most of us choose to ignore the complexity in favor of seeking simple solutions via incorrect common wisdom.
Interesting that some vegans become Einsteins, and others, well, like her…
Maybe it was in retaliation for this:
http://glossynews.com/society/201001070305/activists-missing-after-declaring-war-on-leather-at-motorcycle-rally/