My friend, Noel O., a practicing attorney here in the US and also licensed to practice in both Nigeria and the UK, has this to say about my earlier post on this subject:
" I'm guessing your jurisprudential inquiry to the matter is a rather inefficient way of getting to the simple fact that he was probably delusional and therefore not guilty by reason of insanity. Because if you can in fact prove that he actually believed the goat to be his brother, who in turn placed him in apprehension of bodily injury or death, you would have established that by common parlance his is seriously kookoo."
I disagree strenuously!
Why discount his beliefs entirely?
If, we go with Noel’s line of defense, the idiot man would be found not guilty by reason of mental defect, but placed immediately under psychiatric care for probably the rest of his life; a situation akin to a life sentence.
An attendant consequence of an insanity defense is the untold amount of pain and suffering the man’s family would have to endure in their community, since insanity is viewed as a direct curse from the gods. Such a madman, with his strong beliefs in this bullshit his gods, would rather be executed than allow that to happen.
However, this is the easy way out for Christians in the community there.
You see, as a fellow Christian, we would like nothing better than to call a man practicing his beliefs that his brother is a shape-shifting goat nothing more than crazy in order to maintain the permanence of our own religion. That way, we disavow the existence of his god of shape-shifting or whatever the asswipe prays to.
For the sake of the madman’s family, we should stop our nod-nod, wink-wink derision of these lunatics pagans, and set him free.
Yes, free.
Free into the arms of his relatives, and the decedent’s family, who, no doubt, would like to hasten his journey into the spirit world in order to ask his brother for forgiveness.