This is just nuts

Back in 1990, the body of Cheryl Kosilek was discovered in the back seat of her automobile in a shopping mall parking lot in North Attleboro, Mass. She had been strangled.

Her husband, Robert Kosilek, was questioned and released.

Four days later, police in New Rochelle, N.Y., stopped Robert Kosilek for speeding. After the officer smelled alcohol on the defendant’s breath, he arrested him and brought him to the police station, where the defendant stated, “Look, I had a 15-year-old son and a wife. I can’t call my wife. I murdered my wife. Now, I need to call a psychiatrist now.”

The courts decided Robert Kosilek was not nuts, and put him on trial.

Now Robert Kosilek, identifying himself as Michelle Kosilek, lives as a woman in the all-male state prison in Norfolk, Mass., where he is serving a life sentence for murdering his wife. And Kosilek, who wants taxpayers to buy him a sex-change operation, has asked a federal judge to order Massachusetts prison officials to provide him with electrolysis treatments.

A lawyer for Kosilek argued Monday that having facial hair is “intensely personally stressful to her.”

U.S. District Judge Mark Wolf was scheduled to rule this week on whether taxpayers must pay for the electrolysis.

It would be refreshing if, for once, a judge were to rule there is no “right” for anyone to require taxpayers to fund elective cosmetic surgery, and that if there were any such illusory right it would surely number among those forfeited during the time when a convict is lawfully imprisoned for his crime.

But since vast numbers of people in America are now demonstrably nuttier than Robert Kosilek, we won’t hold our breath.