Television recently showed a likable young man from Florida who had committed an atrocious murder giving evidence in court against his 'accomplice', whose trial had been thrown open to the cameras. The photographs of the victim's wounds were sickening, but the softly-spoken young man went back over the sequence of incompetent brutalities which produced them with unbroken equanimity. Interviewed outside the courtroom, he was deferential and polite in explaining why it had been sensible for him to turn State's Evidence; and as he talked, he coughed, his hand went demurely up to cover his mouth, and he murmured: 'Excuse me.' Looking for a qualitative deviation in the murderer's demeanour, a frightening glint or a nervous tic by which to know him for different, we were baffled by his ordinariness; anxious not to be thought ill-mannered, he held out no greater token of a need for forgiveness than this piece of social small-change.

LRB 1 December 1983 | PDF Download