Buffalo beheader is guilty of 2nd degree murder

Muzzammil Hassan, the so-called bridge builder who murdered his wife Aasiya, has been convicted of 2nd degree murder (Hat tip: Jihad Watch, who's got a court video, and Weasel Zippers):

BUFFALO, NY - The jury in the Muzzammil Hassan trial has reached a verdict. Muzzammil Hassan is guilty of 2nd degree murder in the death of his wife, Aasiya Hassan.

The jury deliberated for a little over an hour before reaching their verdict.

The judge has scheduled Hassan's sentencing for March 9, 2011, where he faces a sentence of up to 25-years-to life behind bars. [...]

Jurors were told that Aasiya Hassan may have been conscious when the defendant started to behead her on February 12, 2009.

Curtin Gable started off strong telling the jury that Hassan wants them to believe that what he did was in self defense, "not a chance, not even close."

"There is absolutely no doubt that the defendant killed his wife intentionally," said the prosecutor. "He was carefully and deliberately planning to kill her."

The prosecutor told jurors Hassan was efficient and deliberate in killing his wife in just "thirty-seven seconds." While describing the murder, Curtin Gable described how Aasiya was stabbed in the head and from the mouth to her ear. "How is that self defense, stabbing an unarmed woman from behind," she asked jurors.

"He was in control," she told jurors. "Cool, calm, collected and calculating every step of the way."[...]

Hassan admitted to the courtroom that he did, in fact, have physical altercations with his wife, but that he never beat or abused her. "Men are never put in the victim's box," he said.

The abuser, says Hassan, often comes across to the outside world as charming and friendly, but to the victim it is a very different story. "A victim often feels like a hostage to a terrorist, a slave to an overbearing master."

On multiple occasions, Hassan claims he attempted to move out, but that false promises by his wife brought him back home. He wonders why Aasiya would continuously beg him to return "if I was such a horrible wife beater."

"Think of a dog with an invisible fence," Hassan tells the jury. "He tries to escape, he gets a shock, he keeps getting shocked and eventually stops trying." Hassan likens himself to the dog, saying he received so many shocks through abuse and threats that he simply stopped trying to escape.

He goes on to identify flaws in "the system," attempting to indict it by saying that his enemy is false beliefs in religion. He compares this with the experiences of Nelson Mandela and Gandhi.

"My enemy are not these people, it is in the false belief in the religion of patriarchy that has unleashed a blood bath on American women."

Some points here: Mandela and Ghandi were both false "saviors" considering that the former adhered to communism and the latter was a defeatist.

It's weird that a man with such vehement belief in Islamofascism could try to use "false beliefs" as a defense.

And I hope he gets the death sentence, the only truly good sentence in horror cases like this. Send him to the chair.