The phrase "culprit that" is grammatically correct and can be used in written English.
It is typically used to introduce the subject of a sentence that is responsible for a particular action or wrongdoing. Here is an example: "The culprit that stole my wallet has not yet been caught by the police."
If weak demand is the culprit, that is worrying: it suggests the oil price is a symptom of weakening growth.
One culprit that seems likely, though, is the particularly nasty politics of New Jersey, and of Christie's decision to block the legislature's efforts to fund transportation projects.
But there was also a culprit that went unmentioned in his speech: the Bush administration, which in its later years began shifting away from some of the policies the former vice president viewed as central to a strong national defense.
While Mr Douthat seems to suggest more widespread access to abortion as the culprit, that is not the only cause of the gendercide many baby girls are simply killed and where sex-selective abortion is the cause it is only a proximate one.
The effort of the 400 volunteers who spent night and day trying to groom the weather-beaten run at Snowbasin was evident in their sleepy eyes, but nature was the unbeatable culprit that spoiled the World Cup series stop in Utah.
The culprit that has devastated not just the health but the very soul of this impoverished place is something that local officials here in Henan Province have generally insisted is not a problem: it is H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.
He noted that discarded food and litter were the primary culprits that attracted rats to the mass transit system: "If you feed 'em, you breed 'em".
They also denounced a list of culprits that might have been lifted from a far-right blog in the West, claiming an international conspiracy of financiers, the media and the United States government.
Instead of bringing in a new team, President Obama has placed the financial culprits that caused our financial debacle in the role of setting it on the right course.
But unlike the powdered professors of Vienna, Semmelweis wouldn't wave away the problem by attributing it to miasmas and hysterias, those ghostly culprits that seemed to haunt women's health.
The appeal of this account is obvious: it combines ancient notions of illness (specifically, the idea that sickness resulted from imbalanced humors) with the modern understanding of the molecular culprits that make us suffer — germs.
