A Killer’s Video Manifesto

USLaw

Sometime after he killed two people in a Virginia university dormitory but before he slaughtered 30 more in a classroom building, Cho Seung-Hui mailed NBC News an overnight package that included 29 photographs, videos, rambling prose.

Does the Manifesto speak to paranoid schizophrenia or a sane, but deeply evil person. Such inferences will certainly play a role in legal cases that seek to assign liability for the tragedy to university administration who it can be argued under reacted to the many warning signs of Cho’s potential to erupt and to a county magistrate and hospital system (Carilion St. Albans Behavioral Health Center) that failed to monitor a patient who at one point was ruled mentally unfit and “presented an imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness.”

The television commentators content the manifesto indicates a mental disorder that could have been controled with medication. Yet, the physician who examined him under a commitment order in December, 2005 concluded “His insight and judgment are normal.”

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A Killer’s Video Manifesto

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