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There are, Dr. Michael H. Stone says, 22 varieties of killers, and he has ranked them in order of evil.
The worst are your psychopathic torture-murderers, at least where torture is the primary motive. Near the other end, at No. 4, are those who killed in self-defense “but had been extremely provocative towards the victim.”
Dr. Stone, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia, said he had put the scale together based on the biographies of hundreds of killers. “I have a very extensive spreadsheet,” he said.
Dr. Michael Welner, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at New York University, has even greater and much more practical ambitions. He is at work on a “depravity scale” to aid juries in separating the worst of the worst from the really bad. It is based on an Internet survey that asks respondents to rank various acts in order of heinousness.
I took the survey the other day, at www.depravityscale.org, but I found it hard and largely pointless to try to distinguish between, say, a contract killing and mailing anthrax.
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