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He does show signs of remorse: “To Melanie, I never meant to hurt you.”

With regards to the guilt question: I did make the honest mistake of misquoting the history of another inmate before, what stands out to me and what I wanted to point out: I don’t think it is a coincidence that both of those inmates grew up in an environment of poverty. We do have the specifics of what happened in childhood in the first case, the second one I can only infer from the fact of teenage drug use and of growing up in a certain environment, which are both things I would expect to have a high correlation with childhood trauma.

This is not to say that Milton is not guilty of a crime, in the legal sense. But to expect someone who has been beaten, abused and has gotten the short end of the stick all their life to take full individual responsibility for something he didn’t have a choice in does seem inhumane to me. In a way like Melanie, he was at the wrong place at the wrong time.

And what purpose would such an admission of guilt serve? Would it take make it easier to believe that tragedies like this are fully the individuals responsibility and that the environment the individual grows up in has no influence on the outcomes?