Breaking a Head for Breaking the Confessional Seal

From Slate:

The Daily Mail brings us the story of Antonio Incandela, an unemployed Sicilian man who became angry with his priest's alleged habit of taking sins that were confessed in the privacy of the confessional and repurposing them as anecdotes for his sermons. According to the Daily Mail, Father Michele di Stefano had a bad habit of peppering his homilies with stories of his parishioners' transgressions, often barely bothering to conceal the sinners' identities.

It is impolitic at best and wildly unethical at worst for a priest to breach the privacy of the confessional like that—especially in a small town, where everyone knows everyone else—and I can certainly understand why churchgoers would get upset if this happened. But Incandela reportedly took his anger a bit further than that, breaking into the rectory and bludgeoning the priest to death with a hoe.

The alibi: Incandela claimed that Father di Stefano’s death was unintended. He says he only wanted to teach the priest a lesson by thrashing him about the legs a bit. But apparently it was very dark, and Incandela aimed high when he should've been aiming low.

Why this is a bad alibi: Because it makes no sense. If you want to teach someone a lesson, you push him into a pond or let the air out of his tires. Sneaking into someone’s house in dark of night to attack them with a blunt instrument is the sort of thing you do if you want to teach them a lesson they won’t laugh about later.

That is a bad excuse for how you killed a guy.