Premeditation

Not every person who commits murder is heartless and cold-blooded. Countless numbers of normal people have committed murder in the spur of the moment, or by accident. However, some murders are premeditated; does this automatically make the killer a psychopath? In Waukesha, Wisconsin, two adolescent girls are taken to court; they were charged with attempting to murder one of their classmates in absolute fear of the fictional character Slender Man. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, a man kills his king and two innocent men so he could reign as king. Both of these acts are premeditated, but this does not unquestionably condemn these people, or characters, to the fiery depths of Hell for being horrible human beings.

Fear is a powerful emotion. It can drive people to do things they never thought they could; like try to murder an unsuspecting classmate. In Bruce Vielmetti’s article, “Girl believed she had to kill — or be killed by Slender Man,” Anissa Weier is asked if she truly believed that Slender Man would hurt her family if she didn’t kill her classmate, and her response was, “I was really scared. He could kill my whole family in three seconds.” When thinking of a young, terrified girl trying to protect her family at any cost, “psychopathic murderer” is not the first phrase that comes to mind.

However, at first though, that may be an accurate phrase to describe a character (Macbeth) who brutally murders three people, including a king, to rule as king himself. However, Macbeth may not be a psychopath either when one considers the emotional torment that he went through before and after the murders. As a result of his guilty conscience, after having a friend of his assassinated, he imagines his friend’s ghost has come to a banquet (III, iv). A mind free of guilt would not plague a man like Macbeth’s did, leading to the reasonable doubt that Macbeth was not a lunatic.