Like I predicted, not that it was that hard of a prediction, Devin Moore’s attorneys are not only using the GTA defense but they’re also playing the race card.
Moore was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in the June 7, 2003, shootings of officers Arnold Strickland and James Crump and 9-11 dispatcher Leslie “Ace” Mealer at the Fayette Police Department.
Angela L. Setzer, his appellate lawyer from the Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama, told Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals judges that Moore didnÂ?t get a fair trial because the judge had disallowed expert testimony and the prosecutor improperly removed black jurors. She also charges that Fayette County District Attorney Chris McCool inflamed the all-white jury by comparing the crime to FayetteÂ?s own Â?9-11″ terrorist attack.
Moore, 22, is black and his victims were white.
He had just turned 18 and was about to be fingerprinted for car-theft charges when he grabbed Strickland’s .40-caliber automatic pistol and shot his three victims before escaping. Moore also tried to shoot out the glass on the police station door so he could re-enter to retrieve his brand-new, $85 K-Swiss sneakers.
Let me enlighten some people. This was never about race. This was about Devin Moore’s car stealing then subsequent murder of two cops and a dispatcher.
Would an all black jury bring those people back to life or go back in time and stop Moore from killing anybody? No. Then this appeal has no legs.
Devin Moore, aka the GTA Killer, is appealing his conviction in the murders of two Alabama police officers and a dispatcher. When he was arrested Moore said “Life is a video game. Everybody has to die sometime.”
Of course, during his trial, The One Who Shall Not Be Named got involved and claimed that Moore’s violence was caused by the infamous Grand Theft Auto video game. The Nameless One went as far as to file lawsuits against the game manufacturer and the game retailer.
The video game defense wasn’t even allowed into Moore’s trial. Moore was convicted and sentenced to death.
Now Moore and his attorneys are appealing his conviction using the video game argument again…
Moore, now 22, claimed the video game “Grand Theft Auto” and childhood abuse influenced his decision-making. His theory was rejected and the video game defense was disallowed during trial. He was convicted on Aug. 9, 2005, and later sentenced to death.
Moore’s attorney, James Standridge, had said that his client suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. Standridge argued that when Moore was in a Â?dissociative state” he automatically reverted to scripted behavior influenced by his repetitive video game exposure and childhood abuse.
If the video game defense wasn’t even allowed into the trial what makes them think it will work in the appeal. If this actually works then there is no justice anymore.
This article is about an Australian girl who was at Virginia Tech at the time of the massacre. She had the following to say about the V-Tech Rampage game.
AUSTRALIAN Virginia Tech student Eleanor Brentnall survived the university massacre in which 33 people were killed and 29 injured.
After returning home to recover with family, the rising basketball star has been made to relive that horrific day by a video game created by a Sydney “sicko”.
“I can’t think why he would do something like this,” Ms Brentnall, 19, told The Daily Telegraph yesterday.
“I’m embarrassed this guy is from Australia. He gives us a bad name.”
Ms Brentnall, who has returned to her family home in Melbourne, said yesterday her Virginia Tech classmates would be devastated.
“It’s easy for someone who hasn’t ever been put though something like that to sit at home and make a video game as some kind of sick joke,” Ms Brentnall said.
“He should be thinking of the families that lost loved ones. Obviously he hasn’t had a great amount of life experience to be doing something like this and he probably just hasn’t thought it through.
“‘My team-mates knew people who were killed and injured and everyone is just devastated by this.
“An apology wouldn’t mean anything coming from him because he is asking money for it.”
Don’t worry, Ms. Brentnall. The sane among us realize that this shouldn’t reflect badly on all Australians just because of one degenerate assclown.
Speaking of said assclown, this article goes on to explain why he has obtained such levels of assclownery…
Unemployed western Sydney man Ryan Lambourn, 21, developed “V-Tech Rampage” and has demanded $US2000 ($2400) to take it off the internet and another $US1000 to apologise to victims and their families.
His website was shut down yesterday but the game is still available on the internet.
Mr Lambourn, who lives with his father at St Clair, posted this message on another website: “LOL (laughing out loud) my site is down because they got too many angry emails and they won’t put it back up with vtech still on it.”
Unemployed and still living at home. That speaks volumes.
Here’s a Virginia reporter’s take on the V-Tech Massacre game…
My urge was to buy a ticket bound for the land Down Under, to kick some Aussie.
Ryan Lambourn, a 21 -year-old Australian man, has designed an online game. Players walk a gunman through a college-campus bloodbath.
“V-Tech Rampage” begins with a murder designed to occupy police. You stop to mail a message to NBC after evading cops. Next up, “To Norris Hall so the real fun can begin.”
“I understand people’s objections… and don’t care,” Lambourn wrote in a posting online, using the online alias PigPEN.
His online name fits. It’s tough to say what art is, but this slop is hateful porn.
I played the game to see if Lambourn had anything to say about the tragedy I covered for a terrible week last month. There was no moral, just a path where progress equaled easy murder.
“I was kinda trying to prove a point with how easy it was,” Lambourn wrote online.
I’m kinda not buying that.
The Aussie’s game isn’t the first to make sport of the Blacksburg slayings. A website hosting the game has drawn more than 125,000 visits.
The same site also features other pieces of Flash animation about Virginia Tech. One is a graphic cartoon of the killings that was posted on April 18 – two days after the massacre.
That animation, “Virginia Tech Shootout! ” was the work of Karri Esala, 20, of Finland. I asked him what he thought of Lambourn’s game.
“I think making a game of the shootings this early is in very bad taste,” Esala said, “but that’s how it’s intended to be…. Let’s wait a couple of years and there will be a major movie studio making money on the V-Tech shootings, too.”
Other offerings at the site include “The Suicide Bomber,” where you play the title character; “Oklahoma City Escapades,” where you play Timothy McVeigh, and “Sniper’s Revenge,” starring you as John Allen Muhammad.
In Lambourn’s game, it’s easy to spot the reference to Liviu Librescu, the heroic Tech professor who blocked a door from the killer to shield his students while they escaped through second-story windows.
Librescu was shot and killed. He was 76, a Holocaust survivor. Last month in Blacksburg, I read messages to him at memorials, including: “You saved my best friends…. I will never forget.”
Lambourn memorializes him with an anti-Semitic remark.
Curiously, I’ve yet to find a game about the 1996 Port Arthur rampage that left 35 people dead in Australia.
Too close to home, mate?
Word.
I haven’t played the game yet because I wasted most of my tasteless game outrage on SCMRPG. But now, after reading this editorial, I’m definitely going to give it a try over the weekend.
Well, well, well. It seems that one Mr. Ryan Lambourn has had his site taken down. The site that was hosting the flash-based game V-Tech Rampage has been shut down by his web host, Liquid Web.
Not only that, but somebody has taken it upon themselves to post Mr. Lambourn’s home address and phone number online.
However, the game is still being hosted at Newgrounds.
V-Tech Rampage has made it to the mainstream press, in Australia anyway. The game’s creator, 21-year-old Ryan Lambourn, is just another mutant.
Lambourn said that while he felt remorse for those who had lost friends and relatives in the massacre, he also had sympathy for the gunman.
“No one listens to you unless you’ve got something sensational to do.” he said. “And that’s why I feel sympathy for Cho Seung-hui. He had to go that far.”
That’s a great message to send, isn’t it? If you don’t get your delusional way, go out and kill a whole bunch of people. Pathetic.
Let’s throw in some disrespect for the victims as well…
The game text also refers to “Emily”. Emily Jane Hilscher, 18, was Cho’s first victim. The subject of his infatuation, she was shot in a dormitory.
“Emily stayed overnight with her boyfriend, Karl, again last night. He’ll be dropping her off at school as always …,” the game text reads.
And sprinkle in a little bit of internet tough guy…
Players who fail to shoot the characters get the following message at the conclusion: “Mediocrity. You let Emily get away!
Are you always full of shit, McBeef? Try again, this time don’t be such a wuss.”
Mix it all together, and what do you get? Just another attention whore mutant trying to cash in on a tragedy.
Or as one blogger put it…
“People like this need to be publicly beaten,” reads one blog comment. “This asshole is possible the worst little piece festering of pond scum in years.”
It seems that one Danny Ledonne, creator of the ever tasteless Super Columbine Massacre RPG, is even down on V-Tech Rampage. He left the following comment at Game Politics…
Inevitably, comparisons between SCMRPG and VTech Rampage are being made right nowÂ? For myself I wish to point out that SCMRPG was never a for-profit endeavor and thus I never posted statements like that which is on the VTR game’s homepage:
I will take this game down from newgrounds if the donation amount reaches $1000 US, i’ll take it down from here if it reaches $2000 US, and i will apologize if it reaches $3000 US.
This quote seems to indicate that Ryan has no intention of leaving the game up permanently or having a channel for discourse (as I have done) but instead has unfortunately chosen an artist’s statement that reads more like a hostage note
I would like to ask bloggers to consider not whether a game about the Virginia Tech shooting SHOULD be made but how we might go about making a game that accomplishes more than VTR does with the subject matter.
Wow, when you’re being talked down to by the original tasteless homemade game designer, you must have something wrong with you.
And to answer your question, Danny, a game about Virginia Tech should not be made. Just like there shouldn’t have been one made about Columbine.
Yes, I’ve heard about the Virginia Tech game where you get to play as Cho Seung-Hui. I haven’t played it yet, but I have the feeling I’m not going to be as outraged about it as I was about SCMRPG.
It’s a flash-based game hosted at the bastion of bad taste that is Newgrounds.
I get the feeling that it’s just some guy being an ass rather than some guy being an ass claiming he’s making an artistic statement.
I don’t know if this is a letter to the editor or not, but this may just be one of the most misinformed opinions about video games I’ve ever heard. It’s basically a commentary about how the media is to blame for crimes like Virginia Tech and blah blah blah…
What is appalling is what most consider to be mass murder is now being exploited as a profitable venture. The video game entitled “Super Columbine Massacre” allows the gamer to play the part of murderers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold as they randomly shot their Columbine High School classmates in the halls, classrooms, library and cafeteria. This real-life portrayal of a murderous rampage that took the lives of 11, ending with the double suicide of the killers, has been turned into a marketable source of entertainment.
Other games put the participant in the role of Lee Harvey Oswald during his assassination of President Kennedy. Another allows a shooter to take aim on Mexicans crossing the border. And yet another provides vivid instructions as to how to assassinate the president. All are presented in explicit and bloody detail. What is next: Terrorist-in- training videos?
What does this say about our society when “entertainment” vehicles are available to anyone that wishes to become a murderer at the click of his or her mouse? What possesses someone who seeks enjoyment from killing in cyber space? And what stops a person from acting out these fantasies in real life? Sometimes these people are not stopped and what took place at Virginia Tech is the result.
I can’t believe I’m defending games like SCMRPG and JFK Reloaded, but these games are niche games that you can’t just go out and buy at your local video game store. And SCMRPG is not presented in explicit and bloody detail. It’s cartoony at best, even though its message is disturbing.
Also, to make the leap from video games to “Terrorist-in- training videos” is absolutely ludicrous. Let’s not forget the age-old classic of parental responsibility, either.
If kids under the age of 17 are playing M-Rated games, it’s more than likely that the parents are letting their kids play it. But it’s much easier just to blame video games, isn’t it?
According to Counter-Strike Nation, the Washington Post had the following paragraph in this article but subsequently retracted it about the Virginia Tech shooter…
Several Korean youths who knew Cho Seung Hui from his high school days said he was a fan of violent video games, particularly Counterstrike[sic], a hugely popular online game, in which players join terrorism or counterterrorism[sic] groups and try to shoot each other using all types of guns.
Now, since a video game site found this before the Post pulled it, you know the evil one has seen this. Lo and behold, he’s sent a letter to Bill Gates, head cheese of Microsoft, who doesn’t even make Counter-Strike…
April 18, 2007
Bill Gates
Microsoft
1 Microsoft Way Redmond, WA 98052 Via Fax and e-mail
Dear Mr. Gates:
On Monday, April 16, at 3:10 pm, I was a guest, as I often have been in the past, on the Fox News Channel. News anchor Bill Hemmer asked me to profile the Virginia Tech rampage killer. I did so, noting that until that day the worst school massacre in world history was at the hands of Robert Steinhaeuser, who literally trained on the Microsoft on-line, hyper-violent shooter game, Counterstrike. I mentioned your company’s game by name. I explained that the rehearsal for such a massacre is key to being able to pull it off, as efficiently as Cho, whose name we didn’t even know at the time. Cho and Steinhaeuser were able to do what they did the first time because it was not the first time. This is why the military uses this same virtual reality simulation to train soldiers to want to kill and how to kill calmly, as the witnesses of Cho said he did.
Sure enough, last night I was doing a west coast radio interview when the host said to me, “Mr. Thompson, you are right. The Washington Post is reporting right now the following:
‘Several Korean youths who knew Cho Seung Hui from his high school days said he was a fan of violent video games, particularly Counterstrike, a hugely popular online game published by Microsoft, in which players join terrorism or counterterrorism groups and try to shoot each other using all types of guns.’
I thus went back on the Fox News Channel, and Bill Hemmer and I explained not only that I was right about your game figuring in the Virginia Tech massacre but also that the Washington Post excised the above excerpt from the story this morning. That is yet another story. The bad news for the Post however is that you can still get the excised excerpt at http://www.washingtonpost.com/…AR2007041700563_3.html?hpid=topnews. Thus, the cat is out of the bag, and his paw prints are still on the bag. Is this a great Internet, or what?
As you know, I similalry [sic] went on NBC’s Today Show with the DC Beltway Sniper still unidentified and at-large a few years ago and told Matt Lauer and the nation that the triggerman would most likely be a teen video gamer trained on a sniper video game. The tarot card was a clue, but there were other clues. I was right, as Malvo trained on your Microsoft game, Halo. NBC reported that three months later, and it was part of the criminal trial of Malvo.
Mr. Gates, your company is potentially legally liable the harm done at Virginia Tech. Your game, a killing simulator, according to the news that used to be in the Post, trained him to enjoy killing and how to kill. You knew five years ago that your on-line game, Counterstrike, so clearly figured in the massacre by a student in Erfurt that the event and the game impacted the race for Chancellor in Germany at the time!
Yet, here you are, five years after “Erfurt,” still marketing Counterstrike. having done nothing to disable the server(s) for this mass murder simulator, and it looks like “Virginia Tech” is a consequence. There’s more going on in the world than Vista. Just ask the bereaved Virginia Tech families.
Mr. Gates, pull the plug on Counterstrike today, or do we need more dead to convince you? “Virginia Tech” was the 9-11 of school shootings, and it appears Microsoft is in the middle of it, in more ways than one.
Regards, Jack Thompson
Wow, he changed it up this time. He used a killing simulator instead of a murder simulator. But as usual, Mr. Thompson is off his rocker. I’m not going to go into the thousand ways that he’s wrong. I would hope that our readers are smart enough to figure that out for themselves. I just wanted to display this to show why I consider Jack Thompson the reigning King of All Assclowns.
