The Huguely Trial And The Search For Meaning

Below is today’s column on the trial of George Huguely for the murder of Yeardley Love (shown left).

The murder trial of George Huguely V was enough to make Nancy Grace hyperventilate in sheer anticipation. Huguely seemed to walk right out of central casting with a formula script for her nightly Murder Menagerie: attractive white girl killed by her equally attractive college star boyfriend shortly before their graduation from a top college. People wanted to know why the University of Virginia senior would kill his ex-girlfriend and fellow student Yeardley Love— trading in his privileged life for a lifetime in jail.

Yet when the verdict came in last week, there were many who expressed disappointment — not just with the verdict of second-degree (rather than first-degree) murder, but also the lack of insight into why Huguely committed this heinous act. The defense seemed intent on leaving that question unanswered. In his opening statement, his lawyer, Francis Lawrence, acknowledged the many questions about his client but insisted that Huguely “is not complicated. He’s not complex. He’s a lacrosse player.” That enigmatic statement did not satisfy the public — and probably not many jurors.
Beyond details of a drinking problem, Huguely would remain a mystery throughout the two-week trial. The defense not only decided to keep Huguely off the stand, but also failed to put on a single witness to speak for him in the sentencing stage. There was little testimony explaining, let alone excusing, his conduct. In the end, the jurors were given less information on Huguely than they would find on an eHarmony profile. “Just another lacrosse player” is not particularly helpful when the jury is looking at a kicked-in door, a history of abuse and a dead ex-girlfriend. It was not surprising, therefore, that Huguely received 26 years rather than the minimum of five years (though still less than the maximum of 40 years).

Martha Stewart lesson
Though many defendants choose not to take the stand for good reasons, it usually weighs against them, despite instructions to the jury not to take anything negative from a failure to testify. Martha Stewart learned that in her trial when she remained silent as her attorneys attempted to paint a nuanced picture of her motivation and thoughts. Jurors naturally wondered why a defendant did not speak for herself, particularly a powerful woman such as Stewart, when people were arguing in front of her about what she was thinking or feeling at the time.

We do not want to accept senseless death any more than senseless murder. There is an entire cable industry eager to supply the answers the public demands — regardless of the evidence. Thus, when Whitney Houston appeared to have drowned in her bathroom after a very public drinking binge, Grace went on the air to demand to know who “pushed her underneath that water? … Who let Whitney Houston go under her water?” Of course, it could not have been the tankerload of booze and pharmacy of drugs in her hotel room. Where there is a dead celebrity, there has to be a celebrity killer.

For jurors, the need to understand a murder is less sensational and certainly more redeeming. They will study every detail of a defendant, from his face to his clothes, to try to understand him in the absence of testimony. It is not simply a search for guilt or innocence. There is a great desire to understand a heinous crime on a personal level. Jurors (and many onlookers) want something more profound — and often less attainable — than simple proof of guilt or innocence. Indeed, the desire for understanding could be more about us than either the defendant or the victim. There is a deep insecurity that we may try not to admit — a suspicion that each of us is capable of murder under the right circumstances. For some of us, it takes more than others. For Huguely, it took a broken relationship, taunting text messages and a lot of alcohol.

Most of us live between lines of the law — resisting impulses great and small. We are then confronted by someone who breaks all the rules and shatters our assumptions. For Andrea Yates, it was a mother drowning her five beautiful children. For Huguely, it was ending the life of a beautiful girl as well as effectively his own life.

Suspect not like me
While we call it “unthinkable,” we think about it too much. We want to understand why a person did what he did — perhaps to reassure ourselves that we would not do the same thing. In the end, we prefer to find a monster behind the defense table. It allows us to say subconsciously, “He’s not like me.” Yet sometimes defendants appear all too normal. When Yates walked out of the courthouse, we saw a scared housewife and it was chilling. Why? Precisely because she was a housewife with a wonderful family and husband. When we looked at Huguely, we saw a lacrosse star graduating from one of the nation’s premier schools — the type of boy most parents hope their daughter will meet. We want it to be “complicated” because the simple truth is unnerving.

The fact is that many murder cases do not have any hidden truth. The search for meaning ends with just a boozed up kid and a dead girl. The death of Yeardley Love was indeed as senseless for Huguely as it was for the rest of us. There is no moral to this morality play. It is not complicated, and that is precisely the problem.

Jonathan Turley, the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University, is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors.

 

February 29, 2012

25 thoughts on “The Huguely Trial And The Search For Meaning”

  1. This case reminds me a bit of some of the psychopaths I have known over the years. Johnny Cash said it best, “I killed a man in Reno, just to watch him die.”

    That is why Jimmie Lee Gray killed his teenage girlfriend, and why Marion Albert “Mad Dog” Pruett killed some of his victims. Every time Leo Edwards went into a convenience store to get a pack of cigarettes, somebody would die.

    They are out there. They kill with little planning or forethought. Just seems like a good idea at the time.

  2. We try to make sense of the world; and murder is senseless.
    It is an extremely unnatural act. We are all mortal, we are all going to die. Except in true self defense we should never kill another.

    I don’t immediately see the equivalence between George Huguely and Andrea Yates. A simple explanation maybe that they both were unable to and failed to cope with reality. Who knows why. Maybe both suffered from some sort of distorted sense of self importance or immortality and could not tolerate rejection or failure of their idealized selves.

    While Andrea Yates was clearly suffering from mental illness while caring for her children. She was repeatedly told she had to continue to carry on in that role. She was given no relief and seemingly only validated thru her role as wife and mother. In her twisted mind she may have imagined drowning her children as the only way to deliver them into safekeeping and relieve herself from her sense of burden and failure in that role. Her detachment was chilling; and it is still very rare that a mother kills her children.

    George Huguely could not accept that Yardley was capable of caring for herself and did not need or want him. His murderous rage in the face of rejection is all to common. Describing it as senseless may be a barrier to acknowledging how often men, when faced with rejection, resort to violence.

    Mespo said it best @ 8:09: “There’s blame enough to go around to the perpetrator; all who observed and did nothing; those with good intentions who did nothing; and those who expected it to happen and did nothing.”

  3. I firmly believe that Hughley would have killed someone else eventually.He was just a disaster waiting to happen. I also knew that the defense was idiotic when they initially claimed that Ms. Love died “due to ADHD drugs” and that the death was merely a “tragic accident”.

    “The fact is that many murder cases do not have any hidden truth. The search for meaning ends with just a boozed up kid and a dead girl. The death of Yeardley Love was indeed as senseless for Huguely as it was for the rest of us. There is no moral to this morality play. It is not complicated, and that is precisely the problem.”

    I also firmly believe in free will. Huguely had the choice even in a boozed up state whether to beat his girlfriend to death. I believe that it is this free will that is the principal difference between a human and say a dog. I believe that a dog merely follows its instinct-If it kills or even attacks a human it should be put down, but not because it has done anything wrong, rather because this particular dogs instinct is feral.

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