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Don't blame me, blame my genes

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From: The Spectator
Date: 20021012
Author:Palmer, Alasdair

Alasdair Palmer on the efforts to exculpate criminals by appeal to their genetic inheritance

'IT is better for all the world,' insisted the great American judge Oliver Wendell Holmes when handing down a judgment from the supreme court in 1927, `if society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.' Justice Holmes had just held that sterilisation of women deemed to be carrying genes for `criminality and imbecility' was permitted by the American constitution. He upheld the proposed sterilisation of 14-year-old Carrie Buck, her six-month-old daughter, and Carries ...

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