               Games, Gamers, & Gaming
Recent Posts
Recent Comments
Most Commented On
Archives
Blog
Link This | Email this | Blog This | Comments (4)
Halo 3, The Killer GameJune 22, 2009 I’ve been thinking for several days about what I want to say about Daniel Petric’s recent sentencing, and the judge’s pronouncements related to it. As you may or may not know, Petric has been called “The Halo 3 Killer” because he shot his parents in 2007 after they took the game away from him. Even as librarians promote gaming in libraries, high profile events and studies citing the negative effects of games and gaming continue to surface, and will affect public perception of what we are doing. Generally speaking, Halo and Grand Theft Auto are only mentioned in library gaming discussions as “These aren’t games we carry.” I have heard “No, we can’t carry video games to be checked out -- they would just say the library has too much money.” Petric’s conviction and Judge James Burge’s commentary at his sentencing will only add fuel to this issue. It warrants a closer look because you may be called upon to answer questions about it. The Case In Court Let’s start with the background, the established facts from the court. In 2007, Daniel Petric (then 16) had been homebound for a year after a snowboarding accident and subsequent debilitating infection. He spent his time watching TV and playing video games, including Halo. His parents forbade him to purchase Halo 3 but the boy went out and bought it anyway. His parents took it away from him immediately, locking it in the father’s lockbox along with the father’s 9mm semiautomatic. (This was in September.) The next month, on October 20th, Daniel got his father’s key to the lockbox, took out the gun and the game, and shot both his parents, killing his mother, then tried to make it look like a murder-suicide. Petric waived the right to a jury trial, appearing before Lorain County (OH) Common Pleas Judge James Burge, and was tried as an adult. Defense lawyers pleaded insanity due to video game addiction. Prosecutors pointed to a mental health evaluation that indicated Petric said he thought about killing his parents prior to the murder. Only the evidence of premeditation prevented the judge from ruling not guilty by reason of insanity. Petric was convicted in January. On June 16th, Burge sentenced him to 23 years to life in prison with the possibility of parole instead of the life sentence argued for by the prosecutors. Burge directly addressed the question of the dangers of video games in the sentencing. Among other statements made prior to sentencing, Burge said “I feel confident that if there were no such thing as violent video games, I wouldn’t know Daniel Petric.”source  The TragedyThis story is both tragic and frustrating. I strongly believe that responsible parents should know what games their minor children play, and enforce what limits they deem appropriate. The ESRB rates games, and being an informed citizen and thoughtful parent makes equal sense whether the subject is movies, video games, or music. (The efforts of some states, like Louisiana and Utah, that would effectively gut useful dissemination of this information and redirect responsibility as an unintended side effect to governmental regulation is, to say the least, wrong-headed.) The best-practice recommendations about the Internet and about gaming both suggest parents need to be actively involved in learning about what teens do online and off, and teaching the moral and conceptual guides they want their children to embrace. And in fact, the Pew Internet & American Life Project's research on teens and gaming suggests that most parents are doing these things, and the teens are integrating these lessons into their lives and their assessments of the games. So the tragedy is that Daniel Petric is one young man who transgressed not only parental rules but the societal codes of right and wrong. Murder is never anything but a tragedy. His life had grave stressors; the accident left a young man housebound for a year who had been active enough to get hurt snowboarding. The subsequent illness and infection were serious enough that extreme physical exertion could have snapped his spine and left him paralyzed. Conditions are home were not smooth. The son of a pastor (New Life Assembly of God), Daniel had declared six weeks before the shooting that he rejected his Christian faith, a decision that surely had been under consideration well before that. (Halo 3, ostensibly the cause of the rift with his parents, was not even released for sale until several weeks later.) His father had kicked him out of the house in the weeks before the shooting; he spent three days living with a friend and playing Halo 3 many hours a day. According to testimony, one session lasted 18 hours. There is considerable evidence suggesting that games sometimes provide a cushion from emotional pain in times of turmoil; it takes no special pleading to see him diving even deeper into the game to escape from conditions spiralling out of control. That the game represented his adolescent efforts to individualize through rebellion against parental strictures might have made it just that much more attractive.  That in no way excuses him taking out a gun and shooting his parents. Period. It does put a different perspective on what and why and how it came about. The Frustration The frustration is that Daniel Petric is clearly an aberration and an exception, but long after his name has fallen off the media's radar, people will still remember that Halo is evil and turned a kid into a killer. Yet 97% of teens in the US — kids just like Daniel — have played video games; 50% of them played a game “yesterday.” 47% of them are playing first-person shooters (FPS) like Halo 3, which was the 2nd most popular of the top 10 games most frequently played at the time of the Pew research (Nov 2007-Feb 2008), about the time Petric shot his parents. How many other parents were shot by their children at that time? What other violence of any kind showed up in the the courts, attributable to violent video games? Did the pervasively-dangerous Halo 3 somehow fail to affect even one other person among the 19 million FPS-playing teens?1 One million people played Halo 3 on launch day alone (September 25th, the day the game was released for sale, when it broke then-standing industry sales records, having racked up 1.7 million pre-orders.) By the end of February 2008, one billion multiplayer Halo 3 games had been played. Did the demons of Halo 3 single out this one bloody-minded boy among millions of vulnerable souls, or is Halo 3 being unjustly demonized?  The JudgeI take more umbrage with Judge Burge’s statements than anything else. This statement of his has seen a great deal of circulation: “I firmly believe that Daniel Petric had no idea at the time he hatched this plot that if he killed his parents, they would be dead forever.” Petric was examined by two different psychologists. Their testimony in court was, as stated by Burge, that “In neither of the opinions of the experts were they able to articulate that Daniel was suffering from a mental disease or defect of the mind, or that for any other reason he did not know the wrongfulness of his conduct.” The judge then goes on to say, “It's my firm belief as a human being -- and not as a jurist -- that Daniel does suffer from a serious defect of the mind. This Court's opinion is that we don't know enough about these video games.” source The level of delusion the judge embraces in his stated belief is far outside any definition of sanity. Instead of saying to his parents, “I have a surprise for you” before shooting them, Petric could have charged in yelling lines derived from the game, something like “Enough restrictions, alien scum! I'll shoot my way out! Mix things up a bit!" In fact, the evidence is that this case is no more about Halo 3 than Harvey Milk’s murder was about Dan White’s diminished capacity induced by a sugar rush in the incorrectly-named Twinkie defense. As for “We don’t know enough about these video games” … how does that justify assuming the worst, as he clearly does? Not only making that assumption, but acting on it as a jurist even as he declares he cannot validate his personal beliefs because of the dissenting testimony of two experts and therefore cannot speak as a jurist? The Video Game Defense “The goal of the ‘video games’ defense is to both shift blame and to explain to a judge and jury why this good kid is suddenly acting like a terrorist,” says Illinois attorney James H. Waller. “Portraying your client as the victim of outside forces… humanizes the client and shifts the culpability.” Waller maintains that this defense works best on “an unsophisticated, typically older, somewhat more rural jury pool or judge.” source As I said above, prosecutors asked for the maximum sentence, life in prison, choosing not to request the death penalty on account of Petric’s age. Common Pleas Judge James Burge said “When all is known about Daniel and what occurred here we will be able to achieve a greater sense of justice” before giving him the more lenient sentence of 23 years. He does not explicitly say “The game made him insane.” He does say “It's my firm belief that after a while the same physiological responses occur that occur in the ingestion of some drugs. And I believe that an addiction to these games can do the same thing.” He did say that he would have found Petric not guilty by reason of insanity if the law had permitted him to do so. source In short, he let Daniel Petric off lightly and did not hold him responsible for his wrongdoing, for committing murder and attempted murder. He judged that Daniel Petric was not really at fault. And I think that was the wrong decision. Petric's underlying mental state is relevant insofar as any murderer's mental state is relevant -- no less, but no more. Petric pulled the trigger. The game did not.  Comparative HistoryThese are the same arguments levied against comics in the 1950s, that “The Ten Cent Plague” would warp proper but impressionable youth to commit murder and mayhem. The argument makes as much sense as the killer who claimed that space aliens made him murder two women, and would bring him back to life after his death sentence. Magical thinking belongs in our fantasy books and our fantasy games, where wizards tame dragons and magic carpets fly. No sane person believes that; no sane person believes dragons really exist to be tamed, and no book or game alters that. Magical thinking has its place in our religious ceremonies and our meaningful spiritual rites. But it has no place in our courts of law. If Daniel Petric had fought with his parents over them taking away his car keys, this case wouldn't be about the car, and the judge wouldn't have gone mealy mouthed over him being somehow less culpable for what happened. Game on. 1 US Census data estimates a 2007 resident population of 41,788,000 for the ages 10-19. If 47% of them play FPS video games per the Pew research data, this translates to 19,640,360 players. Posted by Liz Danforth on June 22, 2009 | Comments (4) Industries: Gaming
June 22, 2009
In response to: Halo 3, The Killer Game level250geek commented: As of yet, the villagers have stayed home with their pitchforks over this, but it is so very disturbing that the judge was so willingly ignorant to the facts. He has a preconceived notion of video games, and basically said "Shove all the evidence, this is what I think." Isn't that what they mean by "legislating from the bench?" Don't we frown on that. Thanks Judge Burge; you just gave the uninformed and unenlightened legitimacy.
June 22, 2009
In response to: Halo 3, The Killer Game E. B. Naime commented: This is, in fact, so well said that there really isn't anything to add. Except that I can't resist adding a "well said!"
June 22, 2009
In response to: Halo 3, The Killer Game Ian McKinney commented: This makes me think of the James Dallas Egbert III case - arguably the case most responsible for D&D's bad name in the 1980s. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_tunnel_incident gives a reasonably concise summary of the events. The similarity is that anyone who's obsessed with something can give their obsession a bad name, but blaming the obsession is usually taking the easy way out. The truth is that the mental health of such people is what's broken in the first place - not that one obvious obsession is driving them to do terrible things.
June 23, 2009
In response to: Halo 3, The Killer Game Earl B commented: Indeed. As I pointed out in my comments on "Words about Words" it is very much the stability of the individuals in question, not their chosen obsession. The defense lawyers jobs are to redirect fault in any way they can. Unfortunately, often innocent or defenseless parties and pastimes get caught in the dragnet.
Advertisement
|
Advertisements
|
|
|
|
