Quote Originally Posted by nikvoodoo View Post
To me what's most remarkable about his plea of insanity is that it was accepted. The insanity defense is one of the hardest to pull off because you have to establish that at the time you commit your crimes you didn't know right from wrong and establishing one's mental state at a specific time in the past is truly impossible. It's whomever's lawyer can afford the best expert witness to convince a jury. So "Ink" must have really had something wrong with him to enter that plea and have it accepted. However, the insanity defense can be used for stabbings and shootings not just weirdly heinous crimes.

I hadn't considered it, but if he had been a zombie before hand and his crimes were committed a year before the story begins the outbreak would have happened a lot sooner. Not saying there's no merit in the theory, it just requires another extra step in the pathology of the virus (if that's what this truly is) and that the virus laid dormant for a year as it spread world wide. If it did lay dormant, that could explain why it unleashed on a global scale all at one time. It might have looked like a flu virus or something innocent like that until everyone's eyes turned glassy...
I didn't mean that one can't enter an insanity plea on a normal murder; I meant what you said - that actually getting away with a plea of insanity is really something. I expect the crimes would have to be pretty heinous and downright weird for the plea to hold water at all. It works all the time in Star Trek, though.

This is just me thinking out loud, but I don't think it would have to lay dormant. Maybe he just didn't infect anybody else? I don't know, there's more to it than this. But as for the people he murdered, they wouldn't have a chance of zombification since (in my theory) he ate them.