"The line between sociopathy (or anti-social personality disorder if you prefer) and mental illness is very thin."

Jesus! I don't know what to think about it. I always thought that it was easy to identify a sociopath when he/she behaves violently.
What now?

The Sociopath just has to take the correct magical psychiatric medication, right Philip?

The "shooter" did go "insane" or 'something' last spring shortly after his visit from his uncle.

The child rape is atrocious and, yes, the "shooter" was a scumbag, the worst of the worst. BUT, this sentence from the newspaper article reads: "An investigation into that incident led to a second-degree felony charge of child rape in July. Clemmons was in and out of jail through the summer and fall, before his Nov. 23 release after posting bond."

In and out of jail - I wonder which psychiatric meds he received [and you can bet he received them since he was obviously so mentally ill] and I wonder, since he did his police murders 6 days after being out of jail, whether he was in abrupt withdrawal.

Go to Google and type in "The Shooting Drugs". This book gives you a pretty good idea of what could have happened.

"The line between sociopathy (or anti-social personality disorder if you prefer) and mental illness is very thin."
Mental illness as in a brain chemical imbalance? What do you mean by mental illness? Evil is mental illness? Stupid is mental illness? Antisocial is mental illness?

You are looking for a clean scientific name to for your moral judgement, a fancy medical name for an evil person.
When you give him/her a medical illness it implies a medical solution, and there is no medical answer to (free will chosen) evil.
We(civilized society) put overt evil in jails or cages.
We put a hidden evil of The_Corporationin charge of running our country.

You seem to claim that you've not drunk psychiatry's kool aid and yet I can't believe I'm reading this stuff on your blog, of all people. The cop shooter was indeed one sick puppy, but you want to generalize about a class of people based on the behavior of single individual.

The American thinking on sociopathy vis-a-vis antisocial personality disorder is so muddy thanks to the DSM. The DSM refuses to recognize sociopathy as a mental disorder. It only has the diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder. The aspects noted in the DSM on antisocial personality disorder generally involve acts of stupidity coupled with poor planning and even poorer impulse control. Sociopaths, on the other hand, tend to be methodical and patient and have the ability to plot out their behavior. They are skilled at reading and working with cues in their environment to present a fully integrated facade. With this patience and resourcefulness, they are very good at manipulating and charming others.

Very few sociopaths present physical danger to the public. There is only a tiny minority of sociopaths that commit violent crimes or other felonies, much the same way that only a tiny minority of the mentally ill present themselves as a danger to others. While some sociopaths are known as being simply credit risks and minor traffic scofflaws, most of them operate under the radar and they operate quite legally. They know that it's best to blend in with the crowd and they do it quite skillfully.

With the sociopath's pleasantness and normalcy, mental health professionals find this class of people very difficult to work with and will do anything to disparage them, to make people fear them. After all, psychiatrists want to claim to be all things to all people. But mental health professionals run into some serious glitches with sociopaths. Like people with antisocial personality disorders, sociopaths lack empathy and refuse to take responsibility for their actions. Thus, they are totally unimpressed with people who claim to have empathy for others and they are also puzzled by people who only take responsibility for doing good things and try to blame the bad outcomes and the "unintended consequences" on their patients.

I could ramble on, but I only want to say that I find your lack of acceptance and denigration of people who don't fit the mold to be disheartening and totally unlike what I've come to expect out of you. I do want to say, however, that if your friend feared doing forensic exams, then she had no business doing them because these are exactly the sorts of people she was going to encounter.

LOL. I'm deeply confused by this... As is my wont, I decided to find out what a sociopath is (apparently, the term has succeeded "psychopath," in its application). So, I discovered that a sociopath is a person with sociopathic characteristics. I also discovered that sociopathic referred to the characteristics of a sociopath!

This, of course, is fucking useless. But, it seems that sociopathy boils down to a lack of empathy. Presumably, once a person's learned responses fail (ie, a person's understanding of societal norms, and the like), and their understanding of the way the world works kicks in, instead, anything could happen.

It seems to me that nobody knows what a sociopath is (it's not defined by DSM, as I think somebody mentioned), but still, it's a handy label to throw at somebody to explain behaviour we don't understand, and can't be arsed to enquire into. It's quicker and easier to punish, I suppose.

Matt