Aaron Farinacci, the alleged arsonist in the Washington state catastrophic wildfires, has, according to prosecutors, “admitted to starting one Spokane wildfire and more than two dozen others since last year.”
Whoever the arsonist was, he is eminently deserving of the death penalty, and if it was Farinacci, he deserves it in spades.
The premeditation is there, including his admission that he had planned to set the fires weeks before actually doing so, and his scheme included choosing a day with high wind and low humidity, maximizing their deadliness.
His plotting yielded the grisly results for which he thirsted and must have stoked his evil glee, as the fires expanded over 10,000 acres and destroyed hundreds of houses.
Farinacci is scheduled for a mental competency hearing, pursuant to his public defender team’s request for such, claiming that he lacked the capacity to understand the legal proceedings and/or assist in his own defense.
The request was approved by Spokane County Superior Court Judge Jeremy Schmidt.
Farinacci has a criminal history, including a 2012 shooting and killing of his adoptive father and pointing a gun at his mother after an argument. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison, of which, unsurprisingly, he served only eight. He also shot himself.
Psychiatric exculpation is often the refuge of the accused. I was a colleague, friend, and one-time co-author with psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, the preeminent critic of beliefs in mental illness as an excusing factor in heinous crime. He argued for decades that mental illness was a myth, untethered to any evidence of physiological or pathological causes of behaviors.
Such behaviors are invariably freely chosen by the perpetrator with unproven and unprovable psychiatric illness posited by mental health professionals, hired guns who are willing abettors of the insanity plea and incompetency plea, typically unquestioned by credulous media observers.
If there are federal charges, allowable commensurately with state charges, with incompetency to stand trial, defendants are incompetent if they are incapable of understanding the charges or aiding in their defense. If sustained, the defendant is remanded to a hospital until found competent.
If insanity is pleaded and defendants are determined to claim to suffer from a mental disorder that renders them unable to tell right from wrong according to the examining psychiatrist, they can serve time in a relatively cozy mental hospital.
These outcomes are utterly arbitrary and are the result of a “battle of the experts.”
In the case of Farinacci, his cognitive ability, volition, and competence, the ostensible bases for psychiatric absolution, have been manifested clearly throughout his self-serving criminal career.
In both the state and federal venues, the burden of proof falls on the defense, but that doesn’t mean the judicial decisions are reasonable.
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Farinacci, according to the New York Times, “told detectives he started his first fire on July 4, 2025, using a lighter. … A Spokane police officer who stopped Mr. Farinacci in August 2025 after one incident asked whether he was carrying matches, according to the court documents. Mr. Farinacci told the police officer he did, for smoking marijuana,” a lie for utterly rational reasons. Farinacci further “told detectives he had prepared in case he faced arrest after setting what would become the Old Trails fire: He had a plan, police said, if confronted, to pull a knife from his backpack and try to get the police to shoot him [thus, suicide by police, another understandable reaction.”
If ever there were a case warranting capital punishment, it is for an unrepentant serial arsonist. Don’t feel sympathy for this utterly evil perpetrator.
Richard E. Vatz is a distinguished professor emeritus of political rhetoric at Towson University and author of The Only Authentic of Persuasion: the Agenda-Spin Model (Bookwrights House, 2024) and over 200 other works, essays, lectures, and op-eds. He is the benefactor of the Richard E. Vatz Best Debater Award at Towson. The Van Bokkelen Auditorium at Towson University has been named after him.