A lawyer from Towson, who lived on a particularly quiet block, beat his neighbor, another man of about the same age, into submission in his own dining room, then bound him to a chair where he kept him for hours, beating him further and mocking him for having urinated on himself. The man’s explanation for why he beat this neighbor so mercilessly was that the neighbor had hit his own wife in the plain sight the lawyer’s children, who had come over to swim in their in-ground pool. The lawyer entered his neighbor’s house that day, claiming that he had a real estate investment opportunity that he wanted to share and then began to beat him right as they sat down at the dining room table to discuss the matter, two glasses of iced tea set before them. In court, the accused lawyer explained that a week earlier, his children came home with their story about seeing their friends’ father strike his wife, and it was then that he planned to punish the man. The next weekend he called him to suggest the investment opportunity and set up a time to discuss it further. His anger must have been substantial, considering that he broke the man’s fingers with only his bare hands and beat him badly enough to require sixty-four stitches altogether. The criminal charges against the lawyer were particularly harsh, despite the unsympathetic history of the victim, because he had, it was revealed, brought his own children with him to witness the violence that he had committed for several hours against his neighbor. He claimed that he wished to instill upon them a sense of “moral balance.”
