With all the lurid news reporting
about police shootings and gender victimhood—with hardly a ripple of acknowledgment
of underlying motivations and issues—the Jodi Arias’ “retrial” for sentencing
for first degree premeditated murder easily passed under the radar. After the
first jury had deadlocked on a decision to send Arias to death row, a second jury
had been empanelled to hear once more the evidence in the shockingly gruesome
case to determine if the death penalty was warranted. The retrial had been
delayed until 2015, when Arias created a stir when she fired her own attorneys
and announced she wanted to represent herself, but now the case has come to
a conclusion, when three weeks ago an Arizona judge sentenced her to natural life in prison
without the possibility of parole for the murder of her former boyfriend,
Travis Alexander.
The second jury also deadlocked
on the question of giving Arias the death penalty, but this time on a single
vote. The sole holdout claimed that she didn’t believe that the “state” should
be allowed to execute an individual; it is odd that she didn’t mention this
during jury selection, since it would have disqualified her from serving.
Information about her since then suggested she was a “stealth” juror who hoped
to “muck up” the case with her own agenda.
The Arias case exposed many of
the hypocrisies of this society. It was clear from the evidence that Arias was a
psychotic stalker and a pathological liar, as well as “suffering” from egotistical
delusions. It was plainly evident that that this Latina, who prosecution expert
witness Janeen DeMarte described as having an “unstable sense of identity,” had
an obsessive fixation on an Anglo male with the intent to marry him in order to
achieve social status in the white American world. In order to do so, she converted
to his Mormon faith, dyed her hair blonde and offered him every sexual
gratification. In return, she apparently expected to become his “life partner.”
Yet it is clear that from their
communications that Alexander found her desperate clinging and incessant
demands on his attention emotionally draining, and ultimately intolerable. The
evidence showed that one she had realized that Alexander had decided to break
with her permanently, she concocted a revenge killing, a plan that included
covering any “tracks” that would place her in the state of Arizona at the time of
murder. Alexander was found in his home stabbed multiple times; photos that the
killer took with a cell phone found at the scene (and who had tried to erase)
showed that this attack took place when he was practically defenseless standing
in a tight shower space; he was shot at least once to finish the job. The
murder scene indicated actions of ruthless savagery—whether out of unbalanced
mind or planned precision.
There was no way that this act
could have been justified by any “normal” definition, although many gender
“victim” advocates have tried. There were those who were ready and willing (and
still are) to believe her claims that this was a “response” to acts of domestic violence against her, despite the
fact that there was no evidence at all that Arias was physically harmed by
Alexander (of course, gender advocates have little use for evidence or facts
when pushing their agenda). In fact, the evidence suggested that at the very
least it was she who was a serial psychological abuser; one “expert” presented
by the defense, Alyce LaViolette, repeatedly insulted the intelligence of
jurors and court observers by claiming to look at the “holistic” view of the
case in order to justify her blatant disregard of Arias’ stalking behavior and
“borderline personality disorder,” and Alexander’s repeated insinuations as to
the difficulty in dealing with her unpredictable emotional states and demands.
Arias apparently suffered from a
delusion quite different than, say, Adele Hugo. Adele in her futile pursuit of
Lt. Pinson at least claimed to live a life governed by the “religion of love,”
although under the influence of proto-feminist George Sand (who opposed
marriage and advocated something akin to “free love”), she initially rejected
Pinson’s marriage proposal, but soon regretted her decision when it became
clear that far being “hurt,” Pinson merely shrugged his shoulders went looking
for other fish in the sea. Adele’s inherited mental illness merely became even
more pronounced she fixated on the uninterested Pinson for years even before he
left with his regiment to Halifax. When she finally returned to France in 1875,
she was so far gone that she didn’t recognize close family friends or even her
own brother, who served as her family confidant during her time in “exile.” She
would live the last 40 years of her life in luxurious fashion on the grounds of
a funny farm for the well-to-do, as she was the only member of Victor Hugo’s
immediate family still alive when he passed away in 1885, and inherited most of
his estate.
But Adele Hugo’s story has been
the subject of “revision,” at least by one biographer, Leslie Smith Dow. In her
book La Miserable, Dow ignores the
evidence of her own narrative and declares in her introduction that Adele was
the “victim” of a “patriarchal” society in which marriage was virtual
“slavery.” Yet in telling the story, Adele rejects numerous suitors before
deciding for some reason that marriage to the hard-to-get English officer is
her ticket to personal “freedom.” The reality is that in the case of women who
lived in luxury and comfort like Adele, this was usually heard from “artists”
and writers who believed that they were not taken seriously enough by their
male peers. The sad fact of the matter was that Adele was a seriously
unbalanced woman and a pathological liar (although perhaps this was because she wanted to conceal her passion for
Pinson from outsiders), and who allowed herself to be influenced by at least
one person (Sand) whose beliefs proved contrary to the domestic stability she
needed.
Now, in regard to
Arias, she also suffers from mental illness, but this society chooses to call
it something else—like being a “victim.” The truth was that “love” was not her
“religion,” but access through a good-looking Anglo male into a “privileged”
world she felt had excluded her. In order to gain entry into that world, she
discarded self-respect and willingly became a suppliant sex object. If Arias
was “normal,” she never would have consented to degrade herself in such a
manner, and she would have ended her relationship with Alexander on her own
accord. Instead she became obsessed with the idea that Alexander “owed” her,
and in her psychotic state of mind, the penalty for refusing to make “payment”
due her was murder of a most grisly variety.
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