One of the most distrubing videogame-related court cases in history is drawing to a close this week. Two years ago, Troy Victorino and three accomplices broke into a house in Deltona, Florida, bludgeoning the six inhabitants to death with baseball bats. Victorino had earlier been evicted from a house by one of the victims, Erin Belanger, who had retained several of his personal items, including an Xbox console.
Victorino and Jerone Hunter were convicted last week of six counts of first-degree murder with the jury recommending the death penalty for both. Yesterday a third defendant, Michael Salas, was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Reporting on the case has drawn criticism from some videogame sites (for example here and here) for the way in which the console itself has defined the gruesome case - some have argued that implicit suggestions of blame have been levied on videogaming through the generally used 'Xbox Murders' monicker. A question (rendered peripheral, surely, considering there are murders involved) has arisen: if the fatal dispute had been over a car, jewellery or almost any other consumable, would the case have attracted such a sensationalist label?
Update: As Jonman points out in his comment below, the alternative and more viable argument in this case, is that the Xbox is a cheap gadget - repeated references to it merely highlight the pointlessness of the tragic incident.
Read the latest on the case here.
