In 1977, Ronny Zamora, a fifteen-year-old Costa Rican immigrant who lived in New York City with his mother and stepfather, was tried for the murder of his eighty-two-year-old neighbor. Apparently Zamora had shot the woman after she had discovered him robbing her home; he subsequently fled in the victim’s car. During Zamora’s trial, his lawyer offered a novel defense: He argued that Zamora should not be held responsible for his crime because he was the victim of a type of insanity that stemmed from being “under the influence of prolonged, intense, involuntary, subliminal television intoxication.” Beginning when he was a young child, Zamora had spent countless hours home alone watching TV while his mother worked. Expert witnesses testified that television had given the boy distorted ideas about the nature of violence and had conditioned...