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Italian court gives lighter sentence to murderer with 'bad genes'! | A court in Italy has chopped a murderer's prison term after his genes were linked to violent behaviour. Abdelmalek Bayout, who has been living in the European country since 1993, confessed to the murder of Walter Felipe Novoa Perez in 2007. According to Bayout's testimony,
Perez, a Colombian, insulted Bayout, a Muslim Algerian, over his kohl eye make-up,
reports Nature. Bayout's lawyer, Tania Cattarossi, requested the court to take
her client's mental health into consideration, claiming he may have been mentally
ill at the time of the crime. Judge Paolo Alessio Vernì considered three psychiatric
reports and Bayout's psychiatric illness as a mitigating factor before reaching
his decision. Bayout was sentenced to 9 years and 2 months in prison, nearly "three
years less than what he would have received has he been deemed to be of sound
mind". However, at an appeal hearing in May this year, Judge Pier Valerio Reinotti,
the Court of Appeal in Trieste, asked for an independent psychiatric report that
concluded that Bayout's genes would make him more prone to behaving violently
if provoked. Consequently, another year was dropped from the defendant's sentence,
over the argument that his genes "would make him particularly aggressive in stressful
situations". The case, reported by local paper MessaggeroVeneto, is the first
of its kind where behavioural genetics has affected a sentence passed by a European
court. Researchers, on the other hand, have expressed their doubts over the reduced
sentence, questioning if it was grounded on sound science. Steve Jones, a geneticist
at University College London, said: "90 per cent of all murders are committed
by people with a Y chromosome - males. Should we always give males a shorter sentence?"
"I have low MAOA activity but I don't go around attacking people." |
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