After British banker Rurik Jutting was convicted by a Hong Kong court for the brutal murder of two women, a professor raised the question of the role of a person’s genetic makeup in committing such heinous crimes. Jutting was sentenced for the death of Summarti Ningsih and Seneng Mujiasih, poor Indonesian women whom he first made into sex slaves until he sliced their throats.
Jutting, a British expat, picked up the two women in Wan Chai, a place in Hong Kong known for its seedy establishments. He was an executive at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch and a bright man. However, because of Jutting’s abuse of drug and alcohol, he indulged in a three-day spree that ended with the death of the two migrants, Shanghaiist reported.
Tim Owen, Jutting’s lawyer, told the court of the former banker’s own gruesome childhood experiences to explain his gory action. The court dismissed Owen’s defense and sentenced the British banker Rurik Jutting to a life sentence for the death of the two women. He is now serving the sentence at Stanley Prison, a maximum security prison in Hong Kong.
Paul Stapleton, associate professor at Hong Kong’s Education University, in an article in South China Morning Post, agreed that Jutting’s lifetime prison term is appropriate for the crime he committed. But he noted that for heinous crimes, the psychopath may have genetic propensity to commit wrongdoing.
Although Stapleton admitted that using genetic propensity as an excuse to shirk away from criminal liability is doubted by many, he pointed to recent research findings that provide evidence of some inborn biological markers linked with criminality.
One marker is a ring finger likely longer than the index finger due to differences in testosterone exposure levels in the womb. The ring-index finger ratio had been linked to male aggressiveness, sensation seeking and impulsiveness.
Another marker is the abnormal volume of the head’s prefrontal cortex – the part of the brain when rational decision-making is made – which is linked to memories and emotions. For many psychopaths, those two markers impair a person’s ability to regulate emotions and reach rational decisions, Stapleton cited Adrian Raine, a neurocriminologist who wrote the book “The Anatomy of Violence.”