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Also this issue: Massive Masquerade Whittle Me This Saddam It All |
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October 24-30, 2002
slant
Common Pleas Court Judge William Mazzola's now-famous courtroom scolding of convicted murderer Ira Einhorn.
The court will impose sentence in just a minute.
As has been indicated, the sentence in this matter is mandatory, meaning it is non-discretionary. But if it was discretionary I think under the circumstances and testimony that I’ve heard I would nevertheless impose a kindred sentence.
I think the testimony has adequately demonstrated to my satisfaction that this particular defendant was, in the most complimentary terms that I can come up with, someone I would call an intellectual dilettante who prayed on uninitiated, uninformed, unsuspecting and inexperienced people.
He's the type of person who would feign special understanding of complex issues, the type of person I think I would describe as someone who would buy a book and read the first and last chapters of the book and feign a special understanding; the type who would, for example, buy a hardbound version of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time and put it on the coffee table and give everyone the impression not only that he had read it but that he was, to use a metaphor, drowning in insight as to what was expressed in that book.
There's been a lot of talk about something called "psychotronic," not a word I can find in the dictionary. The word in the dictionary is psychotropic: dealing with outside influence affecting the mind or modulating human behavior.
It seems to me that type of technology -- if you want to call it that -- has been in existence for thousands of years. It is called rhetoric, the type of rhetoric dealt with by the witnesses here in the courtroom, by the attorneys, by the jury in their verdict and, in an indirect manner, by Helen "Holly" Maddux through the testimony and expert witnesses presented in this courtroom.
I see in front of me nothing more than a pseudo-classicist who would drape himself in the trappings of eccentricity or abnormal lifestyle or behavior or activities, hoping somehow that he could be identified with legitimate authors who have an eccentric lifestyle: the James Joyces, the Jack Kerouacs, the F. Scott Fitzgeralds, the J.D. Salingers. This is pseudo-classicism, nothing more than an imitative representation of classics.
As someone who said in the past -- not I -- "politics is the art of taking credit." And I think this defendant exemplifies that by, as one witness said, ingratiating himself as a gadfly into organizations, by being allowed to have a fellowship at Harvard and passing himself off as a professor.
I think the criticism we heard during testimony of other witnesses was not unfounded and the sentence is justified.
William Mazzola is a Philadelphia judge.
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