Are these people serious?
In the year before he killed restaurateur Viola Barrios, Joe Estrada Jr. was snorting cocaine three times a week, smoking marijuana daily and ingesting hallucinogenic mushrooms about once a week, he told a psychiatrist during a recent jailhouse interview.
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Estrada, who faces either life in prison without parole or the death penalty for the capital murder conviction, has brain damage because of partial fetal alcohol syndrome, Adler surmised. He has the developmental age of a 10-year-old, he said.
In a vacuum that sounds reasonable, I suppose, but at breakfast yesterday (where Sabra and I first saw this in the Express-News' Saturday print edition), Sabra lent a different perspective. Her oldest daughter Bobbie will be eight years old on her next birthday, but she said she seriously doubts that in the next couple of years Bobbie is going to develop the foresight and thought processes to, say, attempt to burn the evidence of a murder she committed. (And I will point out that I'm sure she isn't going to go shooting people with arrows, guns or anything else to get money from them...) I may well be a heartless bastard for saying this, but damn, people, dispense with the excuses and put the needle in that monster so he can't do to anyone in prison what he did to Viola Barrios!
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