\u201cI would respectfully suggest that one trial court judge, three appellate court judges, and the majority of this court simply do not get it,\u201d [Justice William O\u2019Neill] wrote. \u201cPTSD is not an excuse. It is an explanation.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is more at stake here than garden-variety excuses for criminal culpability,” he wrote. “Belew was a marginal Marine recruit; he developed PTSD while on active duty; and he was turned out of the service with a bad-conduct discharge and little or no capacity to function safely in society.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Justice O’Neill continued that the military \u201ctook a marginal recruit from an abusive family and turned him into a fighting machine.\u201d He claimed that the shootout was an attempted “suicide by cop”. Well, except that people with PTS don’t normally try to hurt others and Belew actually tried to shoot officers.<\/p>\n
According to prosecutors, Belew had a history of violent behavior as a juvenile offender before he joined the Marines. As a juvenile, the military wouldn’t have been informed of that history. The judge said that \u201cPTSD is not an excuse. It is an explanation.” Well, it looks to me as if Belew is using PTS as an excuse for his bad behavior, if the prosecutor is to be believed and the Ohio Supreme Court made the correct decision, a decision best for the veteran community – you know, the vast majority of us who don’t use our military experiences as an excuse for our bad decisions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Toledo Blade reports that the Ohio Supreme Court didn’t accept the excuse that Jeffrey Belew’s … Ohio Court: ‘No’ to Jeffrey Belew’s PTS excuse<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":53770,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[118],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-veterans-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53766\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/53770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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