Responsibility. It is defined in The American Heritage Dictionary as the state or fact of being required to give account for something.
It is a fairly basic theory which people across the world are taught during their upbringing and use to govern themselves, as a way to prevent constant conflict between individuals.
But nowadays there seems to be a common trend in which people are finding special circumstances to use as excuses for their inappropriate action instead of taking responsibility.
This is played out almost everyday in courtrooms across America. Individuals and their defense attorneys use self-justifying pleas like temporary insanity and past traumatic experiences as excuses to influence the jury in its final decision.
Most of the time, this tactic works and these individuals are placed in the mental ward of a hospital or released to the custody of the family and even set free, instead of being put behind bars.
An example of this way of thinking is a 20-year-old college freshman named Paul Cox, who distorted the legal system in his favor by using as a defense, the fact that he suffered from an “alcoholic blackout,” which altered the way his mind processed thoughts and made him not remember anything immediately after the fact.
An article in New York magazine described Cox as a “wasp-y” college student from an upper middle class family who was having trouble balancing academics and the social aspects of attending college. Cox even used the campaign slogan of “partying until you flunk out,” while running for class president. After winning the election he proceeded to flunk out.
Cox’s legal trouble began on Dec. 30, 1988, after he and some friends went out partying and got intoxicated. Cox proceeded to crash his mother’s car and revisit the house in which he once lived in during his childhood. He then killed the current residents of the house, Mr. and Mrs. Chervu. The couple were not just murdered, they were butchered. Cox even slit their throats to ensure the two would die.
After the Chervu’s bodies were discovered, the police dismissed the murders as a vendetta that was carried out by Indian assassins sent to kill the couple for something they did in their former homeland.
Several years after the crime, Cox started having nightmares and as his memory returned at his Alcoholic Anonymous (AA) meetings, he began telling people he may have killed two people.
On May 20, 1993, Paul was arrested in connection with the murders of the Chervus after one of the members of AA broke the confidentiality of the organization by reporting to the police Cox’s dark recollections.
When in court, Cox and his attorneys used the term “alcohol blackout” in his defense and swayed the jury into a hung decision, prompting a mistrial. However, some of the witnesses’ testimony during the trial could make one question the legitimacy of Cox’s “blackout” theory. Since there were no eyewitnesses of the brutal crimes, many of the witnesses were drawn from the AA group with which Cox was associated and shared his memory. The witnesses’ testimony of Cox’s accounts of the crime were “clear as a bell.”
The attorney’s representing Cox explained that many times the word insanity is a “cop-out” and used in cases where the person is not responsible for his or her actions. And Cox’s case had a legitimate reason for using the word insanity in his defense.
The irony of this case is astonishing because of all of the evidence which points to Cox and his guilt, however, because his plea of insanity, the trial ended in a mistrial. Individuals in the end should be responsible for their actions whether or not influenced by a foreign substance. An individual should understand the risks they take when ingesting substances in their bodies which can alter the way they think properly. The real cop-out is not accepting the responsibility for their actions.
