"I don't know how on earth anyone can expect a child who went through that kind of torture and, then, lived with that monster for 4 years without benefit of positive influences like teachers or clergy could expect him to form a healthy conscience! Sheesh!"
The Jesuits used to say "Give me a boy for the first six years, and he is mine for life."
(That doesn't sound so good nowadays.)
But what they were talking about was religious formation. I would think that Shawn had excellent religious training in his first eleven years of life, and that some of it would come back to him when ordered to kidnap and hold Ben Ownby.
Of course, the brutality imposed on him over those four years could have erased from his mind all religious and moral beliefs.
It is also a conundrum for law enforcement. At what point is a person responsible for his own actions, and could Shawn have become a willing accomplice in the Ownby kidnapping? How do you determine if a sane person has a conscience? Or maybe Shawn is no longer sane.
Again--the Patty Hearst case. She was prosecuted and convicted for armed robbery. I never agreed with that decision. It is a very complex issue.
It is just so sad and awful.
I think they should torture that coward Devlin the way he tortured Shawn, and get from him the truth of how many boys he has corrupted and destoyed (and maybe even killed).
"But what they were talking about was religious formation. I would think that Shawn had excellent religious training in his first eleven years of life, and that some of it would come back to him when ordered to kidnap and hold Ben Ownby.
Of course, the brutality imposed on him over those four years could have erased from his mind all religious and moral beliefs."
Exactly. It is easy for you to project what should have happened based on your adult perspective and your understanding of faith. But we can't know what went on in his mind. We do know that other people in similar situations have also been broken of their wills. When you combine that absence of will with an isolation from others who might have provided him with a moral compass, it is understandable that he lost all semblance of a conscience and was strictly in survival mode. I think one of the reasons we didn't see this phenomenon with Holocaust survivors is because they were all together and could look to each other for moral reenforcement.
"It is also a conundrum for law enforcement. At what point is a person responsible for his own actions, and could Shawn have become a willing accomplice in the Ownby kidnapping?" Well, according to everything we've heard from law enforcement -- both on the record and off the record -- they consider him a victim and not a willing accomplice. I trust that they know more than we do and I trust that medical professionals can distinguish a real syndrome from a fake one.
As for Patty Hearst, I don't know much about her case -- I was in diapers at the time. But I'm not surprised that a jury in the seventies convicted her. Look at all the skepticism surrounding Shawn, even with everything we now know. How could we expect a comparatively "unenlightened" (for lack of a better term) jury from the seventies to grasp what people still have a hard time grasping now?
I think we have a lot to learn about the human mind.