“I perfectly understand the families of the victims want to throttle him. It is hard to get a handle on the amount of damage he has done,” Sheldon said. “John Allen Muhammad is absolutely responsible. He’s guilty. But there are glimpses of him being thoughtful. People don’t want to see that. It’s much easier to wrap him up into the thing he did.”…

“One thing people forget is that we don’t see people in a terrible crisis,” Connell said. “Whatever led Muhammad or Powell to do what they did, we don’t see that. We seem them locked in a jail where they have no communication with the outside world.”

“We talk about their cases, sure. But we also talk about sports. We talk about the magazines they read. We talk about what they had to eat,” he added.