“I wonder if a perpetrator gets a lighter sentence for such a killing if he claims that God made him do it, versus saying that he just felt like it. Juries are bound to feel pity for a fellow religious person perhaps.. – YAH (11/17/2009 6:53:46 PM )

Dear YAH -

I don’t know about juries but here are two recent follow-up stories to the entry I posted on March 11 that make me wonder exactly how bad and dangerous a person’s religious delusions must be before Americans insist that person be locked up….

No Prison Time For Canadian Resident In US Stabbing (CTV News/The Canadian Press; Oct 23)

MOORHEAD, Minnesota: A 33-year-old man from Canada won’t face prison time after being found not guilty by reason of insanity for stabbing a Montana trucker at a Moorhead rest stop.

Harmit Bhangu will instead be deported after he’s sentenced to jail time already served on a separate assault charge. He’ll go to either Canada, where he’d been working, or to his native India.

Clay County Attorney Brian Melton did not oppose a doctor’s determination that Bhangu didn’t know what he was doing last Jan. 11 when he stabbed Dale Morigeau, a truck driver from Ronan, Mont. Morigeau survived the attack.

Psychologists testified in April that Bhangu believed he heard God order him to kill Morigeau.

Unhappy Ronan Truck Driver Speaks About Stabbing (Chelsea Rabideau/KECI-TV; Oct 28)

A Ronan truck driver is speaking out about the night he was stabbed. Last January in Minnesota, Dale Morigeau was attacked and stabbed multiple times. Recently, the case against his attacker wrapped up and Morigeau isn’t happy with the outcome. He told us his side of the story. While driving his truck through Moorhead, Minnesota, Morigeau pulled into a rest area. He left his wife in the passenger seat, walked to the door, and that’s when he met Harmit Bhangu. Morigeau says, “he opened the door for me and I said ‘thank you,’ and then there was another set of doors and I opened the door for him and he hit me.” Morigeau remembers saying no more than five words to Bhangu and within seconds he had at least double that number in stab wounds. Police eventually broke up the attack. Morigeau says Bhangu had already been inside the rest area and caused some trouble. Employees inside had already called the police on Bhangu.

Less than a year later, Bhangu is free. A Minnesota judge ruled he didn’t understand what he did. Not guilty by reason of insanity. Morigeau says Bhangu “told the police that God told him to kill me because I was a giant, an evil giant or something like that.” But, doctors released Bhangu after several months in a mental institution saying he was mentally ill, but not dangerous. Morigeau feels cheated. He says, “I feel like I’ve been sold out. I would just tell people, watch your backs. The world’s not what it used to be anymore.” For now, Morigeau is stuck at home, waiting for his wounds to heal. But, even though the scars will fade, Morigeau will never forget the attack.

Here is the comment that Mark Dodge left on that story: “Dale has been a trooper through all of this disruption in his life but I know this was hard for him to take. It will take a death before someone realizes this Harmit is too dangerous to be set free.”

Had Harmit viciously stabbed a Christian while spewing nonsense about how the spirit of Charles Darwin had told him to do so, would he have been treated this leniently?

If such a stabber *had* been treated this leniently, would the story have been allowed to die quietly after a few brief local media reports or would outraged conservative Christians have turned it into a major national story “proving” the dangers of Darwin, the anti-Christian hatred/insanity of evolutionists, and the terribly corrupt nature of a “liberal” court system that permits atheists to get away with vicious assaults on those who put Jesus first?

Considering the circus that Christians have made out of the sad case of Rifqa Bary (among others, such as Terri Schiavo), what do YOU think?