ROCHESTER, N.Y. (AP) - A landscape gardener who strangled and raped a 14-year-old girl in 1962 has come up with a new reason why his life sentence should be thrown out: exposure to insecticides.
James R. Moore, however, failed once more in court Thursday to have his sentence set aside again. One of the reasons he had cited was exposure to dieldrin.
The insecticide was banned in New York in 1985 because it can cause damage to the liver and central nervous system. In Rachel Carson's 1962 book, "Silent Spring," which examined the effects of pesticides on the environment, it was blamed for causing mania.
"I was aware that the handling of the toxins were responsible for the increasing number of 'episodes of mania' I was experiencing during the last few years I worked as a landscaper," Moore said before Thursday's brief hearing before Monroe County Judge William Bristol.
"I know now that they were the true cause of the 'depraved act' on the young girl I murdered."
Moore, 62, argued that he should be freed because his symptoms have disappeared. He said he believed he would be sent to an institution for the criminally insane, rather than a prison, when he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder.
"It's irrelevant," prosecutor Robert Mastrocola, who will argue against Moore's plea, said in today's Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. "It doesn't matter why he did it. He admitted what he did and accepted the sentence."
Moore killed Pamela Moss near her home in the Rochester suburb of Penfield while on probation for molesting two girls near Buffalo. He then raped her and dumped her body in a water-filled gravel pit.
The body was found two days later and Moore, who had been fixing up a neighbor's lawn, confessed. He was spared execution when the girl's parents agreed to a guilty plea in exchange for a life sentence without possibility of parole.
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