Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,

Please take a look at the defendant. Mr. Reynolds, can you stand up please so the jury can see you? Ladies and gentleman of the jury, does this look like the face of a person who brutally murdered his family? Does this bloated globule of a man look like the type of person who uses 18 inches of pipe to bash in the skull of the woman he loved? Do those sparkling—Mr. Reynolds what color are your eyes?—Do those sparkling blue eyes show the desperation of someone who has lost all social restraint, someone who sits naked in a bathtub for hours, angrily scrubbing his skin raw while murmuring to himself about how his parents never wanted him, plotting his triumphant revenge on mankind in between bouts of crying and satanic laughter, scheming deviously about how best to snuff out the light from his wife and his 3-year old daughter’s eyes?

I say thee nay. Mr. Reynolds may not have what society calls intelligence. He may not be the kind of person you make small-talk with on an elevator. He may not even conform to traditional norms of self-hygiene and basic grooming. However, one thing Mr. Reynolds is not is a repeat rapist-murderer. He made that mistake once, paid his debt to society, and has learned from it.

No, Mr. Reynolds is the kind of guy who gets lost in a supermarket. He is the kind of guy that laughs when he smells things. Frankly, his brain is the size of your average walnut. The only steady job he has ever held was an unpaid four-week stint working in an apple orchard before the management of said orchard caught him talking to the trees. Mr. Reynolds couldn’t plot and carry out a murder. His organizational abilities rival that of most adolescent hamsters. He hasn’t the financial means to be purchasing lead piping all willy-nilly as the prosecution would have you believe, nor is Mr. Reynolds capable of even understanding the basic mechanics of force that would be necessary to realize that hitting an object with another object could alter the physical well-being of that first object.

I cite Mr. Reynolds’ history if you do not believe me. To date, Mr. Reynolds has had just four original thoughts in his entire life, two of which occurred during his first two years of third grade. Mr. Reynolds’ mental facility places him firmly within a class of people that are not legally allowed to drive in 22 states. He has a face only a mother could love, and his best friend is a 1958 buffalo nickel. He wears Velcro shoes and is dressed each morning by a Dominican midwife named Jacinda. Put plainly, Mr. Reynolds is slower than 61% of Rutgers students.

So, ladies and gentleman of the jury, I leave you with the following thought. Mr. Reynolds is a malleable ball of fat-putty, incapable of human emotion as we know it, and unfit to breathe the same air as you or me. Please be gentle with his sentence, or he may get frightened. Thank you.

The defense rests,
A.T. Piskai, court-appointed public defender