Recently, the murder of a flight attendant in Zhengzhou brushed the screen. According to the public facts of the case, the suspect first raped, then killed, and finally threw himself into the river. What is not quite understandable is why the suspect should throw himself into the river? So, what kind of person is the suspect, and what kind of mentality was held before and during the crime? These questions seem to have nothing to do with the facts of the case, but without understanding these circumstances, it is impossible to explain the logic of the crime. Judicial practice in correcting unjustly wrongful cases in recent years has also proved that criminal psychology and criminal motives are closely linked, and misjudgment of criminal motives is often an important cause of unjust cases. In order to clarify the logic of the crime and reasonably explain the motive and purpose of the crime, Fa Caojun believes that for a criminal case, in addition to retrospectively determining the facts of the crime from the criminal evidence, it is also necessary to ask the deep cause of the crime.
One of the mobile cities comes from the Law Reading Library 00:0004:10
Follow-up question 1: Why did you commit a crime?
Why the crime? This is the core subject of criminology. The answer to this question has undergone a complex process of understanding.
1. Possessed by the devil. Ancients in both China and the West once believed that the reason why criminals could not control their antisocial instincts was that they were possessed by the devil.
2. Mental illness. As early as 400 BC, two famous Greek physicians, Becladys and Galen, described the symptoms of mental illness and believed that people sin because of problems in the part of the brain responsible for imagination, judgment, recognition and action.
3. Abnormal signs. In the 16th century, some people in the West began to judge a person's chance of crime based on their appearance, such as forehead, mouth, eyes, hair and other external characteristics, commonly known as "face technique". There are also ways to judge whether a person has the ability to control their excessive desires by looking at the external shape of the skull, called "phrenology." The Italian criminologist Lombrosso, who conducted upgraded research in this regard and achieved remarkable results, in his famous works "The Offender" and "Criminal Anthropology", for the first time comprehensively analyzed the physiological characteristics of various types of criminals through the study of the skulls of 6,000 criminals. For example, the skull of the violent offender is round and the hands are long; the rapist's head is short, the forehead is narrow, the genitals and nose are deformed; the robber, the thief has thick hair, and the skull is irregular...
There is also a surveying system dedicated to measuring the human characteristics of criminals, represented by Alphonse Betty Ron. Advocates identifying suspects by accurately measuring the physical characteristics of criminals. Now, after the police of various countries catch the suspect, they will take a frontal and side portrait of him, which originated from Betty Rong.
4. Psychological abnormalities. Since the 20th century, criminologists have begun to pay more attention to the relationship between crime and psychology. The famous master of psychology, Freud, a pioneer in psychology from Vienna, believed in his famous book "The Analysis of Dreams" that the true face of dreams is people's repressed sexual desires. He proposed that people's social activities, anti-social activities, especially criminal acts, are behind the sexual impulse.
Jung, a student of Freud and a famous Swiss psychologist, believed that people's own antiquity and primitive impulses were the root causes of crime. Adler, another Western psychology master who was also an early believer in Freud, believed that all perpetrators are cowards and have an inferiority complex, which comes from the body or from the spirit. Because the perpetrator cannot solve this inferiority problem through conventional means, he often uses crime as an imitation of the hero as a means to solve the inferiority complex. Therefore, he believes that the intention to compensate for inferiority complex is the root cause of the crime.
Modern criminal psychologists believe that the antisocial personality of people who start from childhood based on social reasons, especially family reasons such as domestic violence and abuse, and are formed by long-term repeated stimulation, is the main cause of crime, and special physical problems such as abnormal hormone secretion such as testosterone are auxiliary causes of crime. Therefore, while psychological correction is being made to criminals, there are also countries in the West that "chemically castrate" sex offenders.
Follow-up question two: What is the mentality of sexual assault and serial killing?
Western psychologists and investigative experts from the investigation department, especially the FBI in the United States, have established a special crime research group to reveal the psychological state of the perpetrator through interviews with the offender. They found that crime is not accidental, and the perpetrator often has a certain psychological problem from an early age, which is not corrected in the process of growing up, and is repeatedly stimulated, and eventually forms the antisocial character of the offender. Here are a few examples to illustrate.
1. The Boston Strangler. From June 1962 to January 1964, 13 women were killed in the Boston area of the United States. Most of the victims were middle-aged and elderly women who had been sexually assaulted and violently assaulted before they were killed, and all died of strangulation. After being killed, their bodies are often thrown naked on the street, as if posing for pornographic photos, and the murderer also puts a neat bow on the victim's chin...
The suspect, Albert de Salvo, was an American veteran who was charged with sexually abusing a 9-year-old girl during his service. The suspect admitted that he had sex drives day and night. After retiring from the army, he took advantage of his job as a local handyman, often entering other people's rooms to ask different women for pleasure. In March 1960, he was sentenced to prison for sneaking into someone else's home. After his release, his behavior became aggressive, and he began sneaking into the apartment and tying up the victim women and raping them, and De Salvo claimed to be able to assault 6 women in one morning. In 1965, he was sentenced to life imprisonment in a psychiatric hospital.
2. Deadly videographer. From 1957 to 1959, three female bodies were found in the desert 125 miles east of Los Angeles in the United States. The three victims were all tied up, some wearing only underwear and some naked, and all of them were sexually assaulted. Soon after, suspect Gratman was arrested by a passing patrol officer during his fourth crime outside Los Angeles due to strong resistance from the invaded woman.
During the police investigation, it was found that the suspect, Glattman, believed that sex was binding. When he was young, he liked to play masturbation games and often stole beautiful girls' wallets. In 1945, he was charged with an attempted attempt to force a girl to undress with a toy pistol. After his release, he began robbing at gunpoint in New York and was sentenced to five years in prison. In 1951, he was re-released and moved to Los Angeles, where he became a solo photographer and began to satisfy his sexual desires from models he saw in photo magazines and studios. On July 30, 1957, he went to the home of a female model and successfully persuaded her to cooperate with the bundled photography, taking the opportunity to rape and kill the woman and throw her body into the desert on the outskirts. Later, he tied up, raped, and killed two women through similar means until he was arrested for the fourth crime... Gratman was eventually sentenced to death.
3. College student killer. From 1972 to 1973, eight women were killed in California, six of whom were female college students. The female victims' heads were cut off, their bodies dismembered and their pieces thrown or buried in the valley.
After the killer, Edmund Kemper, was arrested, police discovered that his parents often fought as a child and eventually separated. Kemper was interested in death and killing as a child, and at the age of 14 even her mother thought he was a freak and sent her to her grandparents for foster care. At the age of 16, he killed his grandparents and was held in a mental hospital on suspicion of an aggressive personality. After kemper, 21, was released, he was cared for by his mother. Since then, he has begun looking for single women hitchhiking on the highway and has begun killing people at gunpoint. After that, the body is pulled into the home, dismembered, photographed, left behind, and then thrown into the valley. He also took advantage of his mother's appointment at Kaboro College to lure and kill 4 female university students and finally his own mother.
Explaining his motives for killing, Kemper said: "When I was alive, these women were cold to me and didn't share anything with me, and when they died, I was pretty sure that they belonged to me, and killing them was the only way to make them belong to me." Kemper detailed how he approached targets to avoid making them suspicious. When he saw the pretty girl, he would stop the car, ask her where she was going, and then look at his watch again, as if wondering if he would have enough time for her to hitchhike. This will immediately make the girl relax, a busy man is not trying to kill people. Therefore, criminologists remind us that the methods used to evaluate strangers on a daily basis are ineffective for criminals. Psychologists believe that Kemper killed people in order to fulfill his dream of getting rid of a strong mother. Kemper's mother had told her that the beautiful female college students would never look up to him.
The reason why we talk about the Case in the United States is because according to current statistics, most serial murders occur in the United States. This was followed by the United Kingdom, such as the early Jack the Ripper case and the famous Yorkshire Ripper case. Of course, due to statistical and public factors, there may be many other countries. The Gansu Baiyin rape and murder case that occurred in the previous period in China is a typical serial rape and murder case. This kind of case is different from ordinary cases in that the same offender has committed multiple crimes for a long time, and the modus operandi is similar. The logic of such serial crimes is also peculiar and often difficult to explain with common sense. The reason why criminals rape and kill people in a row is often caused by their antisocial personality, and the formation of their antisocial character often reflects the social contradictions that exist in a period of time, which deserves in-depth study by practical experts and scholars.
Follow-up question 3: What is the use of criminal psychology?
From the perspective of criminal law, criminal psychology is obviously not a fact that constitutes a crime. So what is the role of understanding criminal psychology in the investigation, prosecution and trial of criminal cases? Fa Caojun believes that understanding the criminal psychology of suspects has at least the following effects:
1. Narrow the scope of investigation through "criminal psychological profiling" technology to provide a basis for the timely discovery of suspects. Criminal psychological profiling is a psychological auxiliary technique for judging the appearance, age, education level, social status, residential area and other investigation clues of unknown offenders from case information such as crime scenes. At present, in the United States, Britain, Canada, France and other places, criminal psychological profiling technology has been widely used and has achieved very good results. Many plots in the movie "Detective Chinatown" also show the infinite charm of criminal psychological portrait technology.
2. By understanding the criminal psychology, the criminal motive can be confirmed and the wrong case can be avoided as soon as possible. Judicial practice in correcting wrongfully decided cases shows that the wrongful determination of the motive of the crime is an important cause of the wrongful case. The understanding of the suspect's personality and experience can judge his criminal psychology as early as possible, and help to determine whether he has a criminal motive, so as to avoid wrongly identifying the criminal suspect in the early stage of investigation.
3. Criminal psychology can have a significant impact on conviction. The premise of the conviction is that the offender has the capacity for criminal responsibility, which is based on a certain age and normal mental state. The judgment of the psychological state of the crime is directly related to the judgment of the mental state of the offender. If the offender may be mentally abnormal, it is necessary to conduct a relevant appraisal in a timely manner, and the results of the appraisal are directly related to whether or not the offender can be convicted.
4. Criminal psychology is an important indicator for evaluating the personal danger of criminals. Whether the perpetrator commits crimes on the basis of a momentary impulse or on a long-term distorted character, whether it is carefully planned or out of a momentary anger, is of great value for evaluating the personal danger of the offender, is also directly related to the sentencing, and can be used as an important basis for assessing the difficulty of his reform and preventing re-offending.
Yu asked: Can the suspect's psychology be made public?
In answering this question, we must first understand whether the criminal psychology of the suspect belongs to the facts of the case. If it is a fact of the case, there is no problem with disclosure. If it is not a fact of the case, disclosure may involve personal privacy issues.
Fa Caojun believes that the psychology of a suspect is first and foremost a character fact, and in the absence of other definite evidence to lock the suspect, the crime cannot be determined based on the character facts alone. The reason is very simple, "once for thieves, does not mean for life." However, where there is definite evidence to locate the suspect, the fact of the suspect's character becomes an important case fact, because it becomes part of the logic of the crime and can be used to explain the cause and motive of the crime. These character facts are not only significant in assessing the personal danger of the suspect and deciding on the adoption of custodial measures, but may also have an important impact on the conviction and sentencing of the offender.
In the latter case, after the investigation is concluded, in order to respond to social concerns, the case-handling organ may disclose the character of the suspect, explain the criminal process with a logic that everyone can understand, and eliminate everyone's doubts about the facts of the case.