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What a despicably misleading gloss of the Nowak murder. There is zero evidence that Nowak assaulted Digwa, or that he was a "hothead".
The video shows Nowak calling Digwa a "bad man" repeatedly while filming him shortly before the murder, and continuing to do so when Digwa is walking away from him. That isn't legal provocation, and nobody suggested it was, but it pattern-matches to "two hotheads get into a fight at pub closing time" much more closely than "unprovoked attack by crazed thug from violent foreign culture".
We don't know what happens in between "Digwa is walking away from Nowak, who continues to abuse him verbally" and "Digwa attacks Nowak with a big-ass knife", but "Digwa turns round and demands satisfaction, and a series of mutually escalatory threat displays lead to a fight" is quite plausible, as is "Digwa turns around and chops up the guy who he incorrectly thought was stalking him with no further warning", or anything in between. If we were trying to adjudicate Nowak's Darwin award nomination, the crucial point would be whether Nowak follows Digwa. Following someone while filming them and verbally abusing them is genuinely provocative (though not a provocation in the technical legal sense), and culpably stupid if the guy is visibly armed in a way which means they will win a fight. But the police didn't find any evidence either way on this point, and in any case it is legally irrelevant to Digwa's guilt.
If that exact scene were put into a Sopranos style prestige drama, the point of the scene would be to show that the murderer was an unhinged psycho with a pathetic, brittle ego and "random encounter" levels of impulse control.
Apart from the "psycho" part, I would agree with your characterisation. Brittle egos and unhinged responses to perceived minor insults are normative in some barbarous cultures like prisons (because they show you are not a pushover), and deliberately cultivated as necessary survival instincts by non-psychos who spend long enough in such cultures, but unacceptable in civilised cultures.
You think stabbing someone, and then recording yourself mocking them as they bleed to death is not "psycho" behavior?
In the context of disproportionate retaliation for a perceived insult, no.
Nor did the judge, given that Digwa is going to an ordinary prison and not a secure mental hospital.
Plenty of serial killers go to ordinary prison despite having traits that the vast majority of people would label as indicative of being mentally unwell.
I think this is now a disagreement about the meaning of the word "psycho". I think it implies, or ought to imply, a level of fucked-in-the-head-ness comparable to a serious diagnosable mental illness. The average violent criminal is somewhat fucked-in-the-head, but not that much, and Digwa appears to be in the same boat. I'm happy to agree to disagree on whether this reflects common usage.
In the U.S., psycho (when used negatively) means someone who is basically a sociopath or barbarian.
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