Dad uses "fathers rights" arguments to defend his murder of Mom in front of 5-year-old daughter (Woburn, Massachusetts)

In recent days, a fair number of commentators have called attention to spree killer Elliot Rogers and his links to men's rights groups, who have now crowned him as their new hero. You know, the charming fellows that demand women give them sex on demand. Because they're men, damn it, and they deserve it!!!! Never mind that they're all pathetic (but latently dangerous) losers.

Lost in the media coverage has been the equally entitled killer @sshole  and father, JARED REMY, who uses standard fathers rights arguments to defend his murder of the mother of his 5-year-old daughter IN FRONT OF HER NO LESS. She "threatened" me with "my child"!!! He whines. It's all about my rights as a father!!! That's why I killed her!

Once again, the same entitled lying bullsh**--and tied to yet another brutal murder. Chalk up another one for the fathers rights terrorists.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/05/27/yvonne-abraham-remy-plea-was-maddeningly-defiant/GsPCe1NgcvBb7UAvIksT4K/story.html?rss_id=Top-GNP

Jared Remy’s plea was maddeningly defiant

By Yvonne Abraham | Globe Staff

May 27, 2014

WOBURN -- What a bizarre mix of contrition and blame-shifting we saw in Middlesex Superior Court Tuesday. What a spectacle of the depths to which people can sink. What a vividly detailed map of the wasteland brutality leaves behind.

Standing in that low-ceilinged, fluorescent-lit courtroom, Jared Remy called Jennifer Martel -- the woman he murdered with gruesome force as their almost-five-year-old daughter was nearby -- an “angel.”

He’s the one at fault for killing her, he said. No share of the blame should go to his parents, whom his lawyer said had been unfairly maligned, held partly responsible by some for not doing more to rein in a violent son who had for years been spiralling blatantly out of control.

“Blame me for this, not my family,” Remy said in his statement to the court. “They thought of Jen as their fourth kid…They all loved each other…I’m the bad apple. If you ask my family, they’d rather have me dead instead of her.”

What Jared Remy did today is rare, and remarkable: Pleading guilty to first degree murder, guaranteeing he would spend the rest of his life in prison without parole. He could have taken his chances with a jury. And though those chances were slim – there were multiple witnesses to the mind-bending violence of that August night – he might have argued drugs or mental illness were mitigating factors.

But in addition to accepting responsibility, Jared Remy also brushed some of it aside.

For a man surrendering to fate, he was maddeningly defiant. He said he murdered Martel after she took up a knife, and violated a clear rule he said he had set.

“I told Jen she could leave,” he said. “Just don’t threaten me with my child...I don’t think it’s right when women use their kids against their fathers.”

But Jen Martel did threaten to use their child against him, Remy said, “so I killed her.”

It was a chilling, appalling, this matter of fact assertion of cause and effect. His twisted invocation of his rights as a father -- he mentioned it once on the stand, and again in his statement -- mocked all of the lofty talk of accepting responsibility that preceded it. Even as he sat in handcuffs and leg chains, admitting he had done something unspeakably awful, he was blaming his victim.

Jared Remy didn’t get it then. And he doesn’t get it now.

The events of that night were laid out by the prosecutor in sickening detail. Remy attacked Martel with enough force to kill her many times over. He stabbed her repeatedly, at one point using two hands to plunge a knife into her. He was ready to attack anyone who tried to save her. When she clung, improbably, to life, he beat her, knocking her unconscious. Then, satisfied he had killed her, he wrapped her face in his tank top, like a shroud.

If you are guilty of that level of insane violence, you don’t get to say your victim did anything to make it happen. Ever.

Afterwards, Remy’s attorney Ed Ryan said he hadn’t meant to shift blame, that he was accepting full responsibility. He said Remy was remorseful, but blocked by his limitations and his depression medication from expressing emotion.

We certainly saw plenty of his limitations today. Remy seemed confused by the judge’s question about whether he really wanted to change his plea. He read his final statement haltingly, and without feeling, except for the part where he upbraided two unidentified people for using Martel to make themselves look better. More blame-shifting.

In some ways, it’s over now. Attorneys on both sides will move on. So will the crush of media attention. Remy will be in prison until his dying day. The world is better for that. Watching him shuffle out of the courtroom, you couldn’t help rewinding the tape, longing for it to have happened sooner: Before he came back to the apartment that night; before Martel changed her relationship status to “complicated” on Facebook a little earlier; before he terrorized her two days previous; before they’d ever met.

But for all of the misery he has caused, the brute who pleaded guilty Tuesday has at least spared those who loved Martel a little pain.

Just a little.

The most moving words of this gut-wrenching day came from Kristina Hill, Martel’s dear friend and neighbor, and a witness to her murder. As she spoke, her curly haired son, not yet two, slept soundly in his stroller, his body slumped forward, his tiny hands clutching a blue sippy-cup.

Martel was going to be that little boy’s godmother, Hill said.

“I don’t know if I touched her in the same way she touched me, but she was my best friend,” Hill said. She spoke of the doubt and sense of guilt that plagues her every free moment. She wondered whether Jen understood the dire warnings from her loved ones, whether she felt alone, whether she was in terrible pain at the end, whether Hill herself had done enough to keep her best friend safe.

“I wonder if she knows I failed her,” Hill said, crying hard now.

Dozens of people have surely been asking themselves that question for the last nine months – family, friends, police officers and prosecutors. We’ll never know whether any of those people doing more would have saved Martel’s life.

But only one person really controlled her fate, and that was the man who sat in that courtroom Tuesday. Jared Remy can blame steroids or Martel’s threats or any number of mitigating factors. But it was all him.

Those who loved Jennifer Martel should know that. They should know they are as blameless in her murder as Hill’s little boy, who slept through all of the gruesomeness in the courtroom, waking just as Remy was led away.

And as Hill wheeled him out, the little boy who would have been Jennifer Martel’s godson looked up at his mother, a picture of innocence, his face full of love.

It’s the love we all start with, the love that Jared Remy stole from his daughter, and Jennifer Martel took to her grave.