Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Rick James on August 19, 2009, 04:52:48 pm
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Clicky. (http://www.sltrib.com/justice/ci_13146563)
When Logan Bryson suddenly awakened in the early morning of May 30, he thought he was having a bad dream until he realized someone was beating him with a hammer.
"I didn't realize I was being attacked until I fell to the floor with my arms up to defend myself," said Bryson, who took the stand Monday in 5th District Court in Cedar City during the preliminary hearing for Zachery Frank King, charged with beating Bryson and Daniel Shokrian at Shokrian's home in this southern Utah city.
King is charged with two counts of attempted aggravated murder and a count of aggravated burglary, all first-degree felonies. At the conclusion of the hearing, Judge G. Michael Westfall bound King over for trial.
King, who agreed to be arraigned after the preliminary hearing, pleaded not guilty to the charges before being returned to the Iron County Jail.
Testimony Monday suggested a motive for the attacks may have grown from the trio playing the fantasy role-playing game "Dungeons and Dragons" and jealousy over a girl who King and Bryson knew.
Bryson, 23, suffered a concussion and bruises in the attack; Shokrian, 20, lost some vision and his ability to read and write, which he is trying to recover through therapy.
Oh, to hearken to the days of another era's bull**** notions on the morality of a freaking pen-and-paper game. I can only pray that ham-handed journalism like this dies out when newspapers do.
I guess this just goes to show that there will always be someone who blames all of our ills on the music we listen to, the comics or books we read, the movies we watch...or the games we play.
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Samantha Puling, is that you?
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She better be really hot, but somehow I doubt that.
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Is the article really implying that the game D&D was specifically to blame for what happened, or instead just that the interaction between the three led to the conflict? If the accused is as psycho as he seems to be, any sort of prolonged disagreement at all could have set him off, no matter where it occurred.
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I remember watching a show... I think it was American Justice with Bill Kurtis. It was a D&D murder (maybe famous, I don't know) and they were talking about it like it was some secret cult.
I very rarely yell at my TV but I blurted out "They're nerds!" and turned it off.
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D&D and steamroom games and the Satanic Panic. Do you remember it? I do.
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Man... I haven't played D&D since I was like 9.
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I played a game last year. There aren't that many people aroud here that play :(.
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Society is obsessed with trying to fix everything except itself.
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To be honest I don't see what the fuss is. The prosecution obviously has to establish a motive for the crime. I don't see any attempt on their part to blame D&D for the violence, simply an attempt to establish that the two parties had a disagreement over a game they had both been playing as well as a girl they both liked.
This is no different than if instead of a D&D game the two had argued over a small debt, a TV program they were both watching or anything else. And I don't see any attempt to make it out as anything different.
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So what you're saying, kara, is that the prosecution is just bringing up a couple of possibilities for the attack, namely D&D and a girl, and not directly pointing out either one as the real cause?
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I saw a sketch similar to this story on a show called I think. . "help i've got no head" on BBC 1. It might be on iplayer. But i'm not looking for it.
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let's try phraseing it a little different and see if it looks odd
When Logan Bryson suddenly awakened in the early morning of May 30, he thought he was having a bad dream until he realized someone was beating him with a hammer.
"I didn't realize I was being attacked until I fell to the floor with my arms up to defend myself," said Bryson, who took the stand Monday in 5th District Court in Cedar City during the preliminary hearing for Zachery Frank King, charged with beating Bryson and Daniel Shokrian at Shokrian's home in this southern Utah city.
King is charged with two counts of attempted aggravated murder and a count of aggravated burglary, all first-degree felonies. At the conclusion of the hearing, Judge G. Michael Westfall bound King over for trial.
King, who agreed to be arraigned after the preliminary hearing, pleaded not guilty to the charges before being returned to the Iron County Jail.
Testimony Monday suggested a motive for the attacks may have grown from the trio playing the card game poker and jealousy over a girl who King and Bryson knew.
Bryson, 23, suffered a concussion and bruises in the attack; Shokrian, 20, lost some vision and his ability to read and write, which he is trying to recover through therapy.
it seems it assumes most readers would not be familiar with D&D, but it does not seem to be overtly sensational about it.
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Ironically I was about to do the exact same thing before reading your post Bob. Even down to substituting D&D with poker. :D
So what you're saying, kara, is that the prosecution is just bringing up a couple of possibilities for the attack, namely D&D and a girl, and not directly pointing out either one as the real cause?
Yep. The prosecutions job is to make the jury understand why someone would suddenly take a hammer to someone who was supposedly a friend. The prosecution want to paint the picture of a reasoning, nasty person who got pissed off with a friend over a girl and a game they had been playing together and thought that an appropriate response was to pick up a hammer and go over to his place with the intention of murdering him. The prosecution doesn't care what the defendant was doing that pissed him off as long as it can convince the jury that this is a reason a sane man became belligerent.
As Bob's example with poker shows, most juries would buy that someone could become angry enough at losing a poker game to carry out a violent attack so all a competent prosecutor would have to do is explain how D&D can also get people angry, and I don't think any of us would argue it can't.
To be honest, I'd be very surprised if any prosecutor would ever try a D&D made him do it tack. In this case it doesn't appear to be what happened but if a prosecutor did try it, they should be out of their job not simply because they're demonising D&D but cause they're **** at their job and every other prosecutor would see it.
It does no good for the prosecution to paint a picture of someone who was under the control of some insidious board/computer game as that just opens the door for the defence to argue "D&D made him do it, you must acquit. We'll see to it he gets some counselling and never plays again"
These kind of shenanigans are more the sort of thing you see from the defence as they actually can gain from it. A prosecutor who tried it is actually more likely to lose the case as they've just gifted the defence an insanity plea.
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When reading the article, my interpretation was that the jealousy over the girl started during the D&D session, where the girl in question was discussed...
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Heh, I remember my old D&D sessions, broke up when one of the group was revealed in the local papers as a phone-order prostitute, since it was decided that her going into a teenagers house with 4 males once a week might be mis-construed.
I remember at the time, all we could say was that we were gutted the group only had about 20 gold coins in its possession...
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http://gprime.net/video.php/magicmissile (http://gprime.net/video.php/magicmissile)