Excerpt:
In 1992, Abdul Awkal, a Lebanese Muslim, met up with his wife and her brother at the Family Conciliation Office in the sprawling Lakeside Courthouse. Awkal's wife had filed for divorce after years of physical abuse and a sexually transmitted disease that she contracted from him. In response, Awkal had bought a gun and threatened to shoot her if she didn't come back to him.
On the day of the shooting, Awkal, who would base his entire twenty year defense on an insanity claim, wrote a check for most of his assets to his brother, and arrived at the courthouse with the stroller, child seat and baby food that he would need once he abducted his daughter. He met up with his wife and her brother inside the courthouse and killed them. Then he tried to use his 15 month old daughter as a human shield before being shot in the back by law enforcement.
Awkal told police that he had ordered his brother-in-law to "profess that Allah was the only God." And he had only killed him after he refused to do so. The divorce had been preceded by mutual accusations of heresy and Awkal's letters were full of technical disputes between his Shafi'I school and his brother-in-law's Hanafi school. Similarly his lawsuit against the Ohio State correctional system was rooted in complaints about the prison Imam's Hanbali allegiance.