To the Editor:

We write because we find the treatment of the Lasaga case in the editorial (“Coming to terms with Lasaga’s legacy,” 2/18) insensitive and irresponsible. The equation the Yale Daily News set up between Antonio Lasaga’s “perverseness” on the one hand and his “abilities as a scientist” on the other does a gross disservice to both.

The editorial reads as if prison time and moral punishment will be enough to exorcise Lasaga’s supposed perversion, sounding as if his very essence were bound up in the manifestations of his desire.

It is ironic that although the editors call his crimes “unspeakable,” those same crimes become the factual core of the editorial’s description of Lasaga’s past and future. Instead of its relentless moralizing, the News would do better if it planned on editorializing about desire and science both, to treat such lofty subjects with the investigative acumen they deserve, not the trivial and caustic regurgitations of an assemblage of lesser wits.

Samuel Arkin ’03 and Stuart Watson ’04

February 18, 2002