Why Do Some People Empathize with Murderers? The Role of Neutralization Discourse in Romanticizing a Murder to the Public

In a relatively small quiet city in Egypt, in a horrific incident devoid of humanity, Naira Ashraf, a student at Mansoura University, was stabbed several times mercilessly until she dropped dead in the daylight in front of hundreds. A safe city turned into a crime scene in the blink of an eye. This atrocious crime was an eye-opener to many psychological and sociological problems that nobody had ever noticed. The goal of the current study is to examine the criminal psychotic confessions of Mohammed Adel the killer of Naira Ashraf and analyze his behavior using neutralization discourse analysis. This study entails analyzing his confessions from a linguistic perspective. The confessions were based on his final testimony in court from a YouTube video uploaded by a journalist at Almasry-Alyoum newspaper’s official channel. Neutralization discourse plays a key role in explaining why criminal conduct persists and grows in prevalence. The confessions contain a wide variety of neutralization discourse strategies. Therefore, this study presents an analysis that logically covers these strategies by using both a deductive and an inductive approach.
The framework of Sykes and Matza (1957) is used to analyze the linguistic traits of criminal offenders. It was found that criminals were more prone than their peers to explain and justify their criminal behavior in causal terms, with a comparatively high amount of subordinating conjunctions, implying more cause-and-effect allegations. This framework of the analysis indicated that criminals were inclined to have seen the crime as an inevitable consequence of a plan.