DA: NY slay suspect says victims cast spells

[Warren Stupidity]

NEW YORK (AP) — Prosecutors allege a man called 911 and confessed to beating his girlfriend and her daughter to death because he thought they were witches.

....

The bodies of 56-year-old Estrella Castaneda and her daughter, 25-year-old Lina Castaneda, were found just after midnight in their bedrooms.

...

The younger victim's 7-year-old daughter was found on the bed in her mother's room. She was not physically harmed.

According to the DA, the suspect told police that both women were casting spells on him. They say he was carrying a Bible when they arrived.

http://www.seattlepi.com/news/crime/article/DA-NY-slay-suspect-says-victims-cast-spells-5184277.php

[hrmjustin]

1. Yeah I saw this on the news here today. Horrible story.

[rug]

2. A pereftly healthy man, right?

Watch for updates The judge will order a 730 exam to see if he's competent to stand trial.

[okasha]

3. Only a party-pooping "apologist"

would wonder if he had psychoative chemicals on board.

[Brettongarcia]

22. And when the Bible/God condemned witches, were they on "psychoactive chemicals" too?

Would be that your contention?

[okasha]

30. Would it be your contention

that a book can get high? Or that the Bible was literally authored by Yahweh?

My contention would be that the "Yahweh alone" reformers such as Hezekiah and Josiah were attempting to disccourage their Judahite subjects from consultiong oracular priests and priestesses representing the older forms of Canaanite religion, from which nascent Judaism was then at some pains to distinguish itself.

[struggle4progress]

31. There are multiple possibilities in this case, none of which seem to have been resolved yet

People have wondered whether the assailant was on drugs or was suffering from some mental defect

Some neighbors have suggested that the assailant was just a creepy person and that his explanation was pure bullshit

[mindwalker_i]

4. Well come on, if there's one thing we learned from Salem

uh, I don't know it, but I know if was cool.

[okasha]

5. One of the things we learned

is that accusations of religious deviance may be made by persons who may profit economically and/or politically from the elimination of the accused.

[trotsky]

9. And yet without religion, there's no mechanism to charge them with a crime against god. n/t

[skepticscott]

11. Nor is there a justification

for subjecting such people to horrible tortures, in order to get them to confess and save their "souls".

[struggle4progress]

17. Participants largely, and Massachusetts Bay Colony as a whole, rather soon reached such conclusions:

... Many of the judges, including Judge Samuel Sewall, confessed to their errors in the witch trials and issued public apologies. In 1706, afflicted girl Ann Putnam, Jr., issued a public apology for her role in the Salem Witch Trials, particularly in the case against her neighbor Rebecca Nurse. On January 15th in 1697, Salem held a day of fasting in honor of the victims, known as a Day of Official Humiliation. In 1711, the colony passed a bill restoring some of the names of the accused and granted £600 in restitution to their heirs. Since some families of the victims did not want their family member listed, not every victim was named ...

The Salem Witch Trials

[skepticscott]

18. Irrelevant non-answer

Guess your Google finger got itchy. And witches have been tortured in many places to get confessions, using religion as an excuse.

[struggle4progress]

19. There was a similar reaction in Connecticut following the 1662 Hatford witch trials: Connecticut

de facto stopped executing witches. The last known prosecution in Virginia was around 1730, the year Franklin published his satire A Witch Trial at Mount Holley. Around 1735, Parliament repealed the 1604 law allowing witchcraft prosecutions and replaced it with a law allowing prison terms of up to one-year for people pretending to exercise witchcraft, sorcery, conjuring and the like

That fight ended three centuries ago in much of the world

[trotsky]

20. Yes, thankfully humanity has been on a pretty march in the same direction for some time.

Religion and religious beliefs becoming less and less relevant.

[Warren Stupidity]

21. Do you think that the fact that major religions stopped teaching that witches

existed and witchcraft and sorcery were a real threat had anything to do with the decline in persecutions?

[struggle4progress]

26. I do not think ideology can help us discover actual history, nor do I think we can actually learn

lessons from history without careful and extensive analysis of concrete events at specific times in particular places

[Warren Stupidity]

27. Apparently you are answering some other question.

When religious institutions were teaching their followers that witchcraft and sorcery were real dangers we were burning witches. When they stopped teaching that nonsense, coincidentally or not, we also stopped killing witches, although laws against witchcraft persisted for quite some time. You seem to wish to avoid any suggestion that religious institutions have any responsibility at all for the consequences of the utter bullshit they teach their followers.

[struggle4progress]

28. Your "history" derives from your ideological presumptions: persons in the past

held a variety of views, some similar to what you suggest, others more complicated than you suggest, and still others quite different than you suggest

It is difficult to put ourselves into the mindset of people long dead, especially as most of us do not really understand either the conditions and social relations governing their lives or the particular "common sense" notions that shaped their psychological geography. It is possible, for example, to find in the early sixteenth century persons who believe in a "magic" that can be practiced without recourse to evil spirits and who consider "witchcraft" to be possible but just too difficult for uneducated amateurs to practice with any success at all: at that time, such a person might be recognized as an "expert" on witches while simultaneously lobbying against witch-trials as ignorant panics. Trying to understand such a person in 21st century terms, we might imagine a talented politician with Enlightenment views in the pre-Enlightenment era or a poor deluded fellow stumbling slowly away from superstition -- but maybe it is unreasonable to attempt to fit the person into our moulds and better to say simply, Behold early modern man

The European witchcrazes lie largely in a period from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, and it was not a uniform phenomenon is either time or place: there was a spike of prosecutions affecting some localities much more than others. In the 1400s, city authorities in Lucerne prosecuted with some enthusiasm persons accused of witchcraft, while only fifty miles away in Basel the city authorities tended to regard such accusations as superstition

The actual views of local church authorities may have varied. But whatever views some people may have held, it seems inaccurate to assert that medieval or early modern church officials taught uniformly taught the existence of witchcraft. The so-called First Synod of St Patrick, an Irish 7th century document, often regarded as a copy of an earlier 5th century document, lays out the rule that anyone, who accuses anyone else of being a witch, shall be excommunicated from the church until they have retracted the accusation and restored the reputation of the accused

[Brettongarcia]

23. So you are condemning the Protestant Reformation?

[okasha]

24. Uh, no.

I have no idea how you got from my post to this question, since there appears to be no connection.

[Act_of_Reparation]

29. Not a fan of history, are you?

One of the things we learned is that accusations of religious deviance may be made by persons who may profit economically and/or politically from the elimination of the accused.

If you were a 16th century German prince (and I'm not saying you aren't), chances are you would have sworn fealty to the Holy Roman Emperor, who, by the divine authority of the Roman Catholic Church, ruled over lands stretching from the Jutland to Tuscany.

If there's no Catholic Church, there's no Holy Roman Emperor. If there's no Holy Roman Emperor, then there's no one to swear fealty to. Princes become kings.

Still, I wouldn't be so quick to disregard the zeal of those Luther drew to his cause, and, apparently, neither would you. Apply the same thinking to witches, and proceed.

[trotsky]

25. LOL

Nicely done.

[struggle4progress]

6. ... Amarillo was held on two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of second-degree murder and

count of fourth-degree criminal possession of a weapon. If convicted, he faces life in prison without parole ...
Madman fatally beats girlfriend, her daughter with hammer for being ‘witches’
By Joseph Stepansky , Tina Moore AND Bill Hutchinson / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Published: Wednesday, January 29, 2014, 4:56 AM
Updated: Thursday, January 30, 2014, 12:33 AM

New York Penal - Article 265 - § 265.01 Criminal Possession of a Weapon in the Fourth Degree

[struggle4progress]

7. A woman and her daughter were bludgeoned to death in their Queens home by

the woman’s live-in boyfriend, who called 911 and confessed that he had “killed them because they are witches,” law enforcement officials said on Wednesday ... The district attorney, Richard A. Brown, said Mr. Amarillo told a 911 operator: “Two females are dead, they were assassinated, hurry they are dead. I killed them because they are witches. I want the police to kill me. I killed them with a hammer.” Prosecutors said Mr. Amarillo .. was seen walking to the street, clutching a Bible and saying: “I killed them. I killed them.” An official familiar with the case said detectives were investigating whether drugs might have been involved. In statements to the police, Mr. Amarillo said he believed both victims had been “performing voodoo and casting spells” on him ...
Man Admits Killing 2 Women With Hammer, Officials Say
By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ
JAN. 29, 2014

[struggle4progress]

8. ... A next door neighbor, who declined to give her name, said, “I would hear yelling and fighting.

I would hear banging like he was beating them. He wasn’t a friendly guy,” she said. “This summer he broke the windows when he couldn’t open the door after they locked him out,” she said, also adding that cops had been called to the house before. “He wasn’t a friendly guy, he would never say hello to anyone ...” ...
Hammer maniac ‘kills women for being witches’
By Bob Fredericks, Jamie Schram and Lorena Mongelli
January 29, 2014 | 10:07am

[struggle4progress]

10. ... The beatings were so brutal that the rubber grip on the hammer came off in the process and

neighbors described hearing "loud banging" for "a while" ... The beatings were so brutal that the rubber grip on the hammer came off in the process and neighbors described hearing "loud banging" for "a while," according to the sources ... "The amount of rage had to be unbelievable," said neighbor Debbie Marrero ...

Man Killed Girlfriend, Daughter Thinking They Were 'Witches:' Sources
By Murray Weiss, Katie Honan and Aidan Gardiner on January 29, 2014 7:37am | Updated on January 29, 2014 9:41pm

[struggle4progress]

12. A New York man was ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation after allegedly

beating his girlfriend and her daughter to death with a hammer, claiming they were witches, prosecutors said Thursday ... His attorney, Anthony Battisti, declined to comment on Thursday.

D.A.: Man killed 2 women with a hammer, believed they were "witches"
By Chris Boyette, CNN
updated 3:07 PM EST, Thu January 30, 2014

[rug]

14. That's the 730 exam.

https://www.nycourts.gov/rules/chiefadmin/111.shtml

[struggle4progress]

16. Thanks. I should have researched your reference upthread but was overcome by laziness

[struggle4progress]

13. ... Amarillo's neighbor, Christian Carrion, 23, said he felt and heard the attack

while sitting against his bedroom wall around midnight Wednesday — but thought at first the family was moving furniture ... He said Amarillo wasn't very friendly ... Carrion said he didn't believe "the witchcraft stuff," and doubted Amarillo's claim ... "He's bulls--tting."

Suspect in Queens Hammer Killings to Undergo Psychiatric Evaluation: DA
By Katie Honan on January 30, 2014 12:52pm

[struggle4progress]

15. ... Friends of the victims described them as quiet, private Colombian immigrants

who attended the local Roman Catholic Church.

Queens mom, daughter beaten to death with a hammer
Thursday, January 30, 2014