Nonbipolar Man Kills

Posted on June 8, 2006 in Journalists & Pundits Stigma

There’s a headline you won’t see even though the overwhelming number of murders each day are committed by people who do not suffer from organic brain dysfunctions. The latest case being given massive coverage by the media involves that of Jerry Buck Inman a convicted sex offender who killed a Clemson University coed. The mother of the victim

Bren Souers, said she was angry that a registered sex offender had easy access to victims and that any mental illness Inman might have “holds no credence for me

You know, in a way she’s right. It shouldn’t even be an issue in the papers. But I think here we have the Coulter Syndrome: when faced with a moral dilemna, scream when a potentially validating extenuating circumstance is invoked.

Whenever a death penalty case attracts media attention, journalists help themselves to generous servings of fetid exploitation. Any detail about the killer’s life becomes a magnet for abuse. Remember the Columbine killers? Suddenly trenchcoats were banned across the country. To be seen wearing black was to invite suspicion about your emotional state. Hundreds of nonbipolars kill every day. Yet we don’t see the headline such as the one that leads this article.

A murder is a local event. Or it should be. The national media’s blood lust, however, seeks out the unusual. In Inman’s case, he was bipolar. I am not saying that he should escape justice, but I want to add that I suffer from bipolar disorder and I am not a murderer. To see anyone’s illness sprayed across the wall of public attention misrepresents what crime and my disease is all about.

Here is what we know:

Jerry Buck Inman called himself an animal and kept looking down as detectives questioned him about the killing of a Clemson University student who was strangled with her bikini top, authorities said.

Inman, 35, a registered sex offender, confessed to killing the 20-year-old student, Tiffany Marie Souers, and to sexual assaults in Alabama and Tennessee in the days before her death, officials said.

“We asked him, ‘Why?’ and all he would say was that he’s a sick animal,” said Jefferson County, Tenn., Chief Deputy Sheriff Bob McCoig.

Maybe so. The odd thing about the stigma in this case is that it seems to have generated this crime. I’d like to see a study of bipolars who have commited crimes. Of these, how many were convinced by the stigma that they were animals and began committing crimes such as Inman’s? I know that the sanguinary sane will not like such studies because it may show that their attitudes have a part in what some bipolars do.

Yes, they won’t like such a study in Georgia.

The ultimate point to remember is that bipolars are, on whole, less violent than gutless, anonymous posters from inside the Georgia Department of Education and than the rest of the unafflicted. I’d like to know if Inman was drunk at the time of the murders (bet you he was!), a body state which gives him much common ground with murderers who don’t suffer from organic brain dysfunctions.

If the media were to publicize the role of alcohol in violent crime, what then? They’d lose advertising money is what. We suffer because you can’t put bipolar in a bottle and sell it for entertainment purposes. Reporters might say that this is a big so-what-we-all-know-that. I respond that if so, why are we jumping in excitement and blaming a disease for Inman’s crimes? Why the lack of interest in the other questions such as Inman’s possible alcohol use?

I say that I’ve had enough of sensationalism and other forms of shallow reporting. Though devastating for the families, this murder is not on par with the war in Iraq. Nor is there a bipolar crime wave. It’s time for some real news and some real facts. Unless you are willing to diagnose every killer, leave us bipolars alone.