Doug Berman highlights a potential case that might be granted cert by the Supreme Court involving a 30 year sentence for a teen who killed his grandparents when he was 12 years old. Ed Silverman adds an interesting twist to the case: apparently the convicted defendant, Christopher Pittman, was taking the antidepressant Zoloft at the time of the killings. There's been a lot of allegations that antidepressants have the propensity to cause suicides, particularly in children. Yet there's strong evidence against this notion (including an international study). The link between antidepressants and violence against others is even less compelling (View image)

Update: The Last Psychiatrist has this very good post about the misinterpretation of a study examining the perception of violence, kids, and mental illness:

I had thought the entire infrastructure of psychiatry rested on the very foundational idea that psychiatric disorders, especially depression, are responsible for increased risk of violence to the self. And these quotes are even more weird given that they come from Ohio and Indiana-- the two states responsible for over half the increase in female youth suicides in the whole country. You know, the increase that everyone is blaming on antidepressants.

But words are lies, and you can use loose language like "violence" and "dangerous" and "youth" and "kids"-- bending its meaning to whatever you need it to mean at that moment-- to make any point you want. The actual arguments for this position can be be flipped when necessary (e.g. Nasrallah saying a school shooting isn't "evil" but "medical illness.") You can do this if you manipulate words, e.g. conflating school shooting and suicide to "violence," and then making "violence" mean what you need it to mean at that moment.