Post by marion on Jun 19, 2006 2:10:35 GMT -5
Insanity defense is rarely deployed, fails in most cases
Esteban Carpio's plea in the murder of a Providence police detective is made in fewer than 1 percent of U.S. criminal cases and succeeds in only 25 percent of them.
Sunday, June 18, 2006
BY TRACY BRETON
Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE -- The insanity defense, which Esteban Carpio is using to fight the state's charge that he murdered Providence police Detective Sgt. James Allen, is rarely invoked and rarely succeeds.
Defense lawyers use it as "a defense of last resort," says Providence lawyer John A. "Terry" MacFadyen III, a former public defender who specializes in criminal appeals.
Legal experts estimate that the insanity defense is used in less than 1 percent of the criminal cases filed each year in the United States and that even though 90 percent of the defendants who raise the defense have a documented history of mental illness, only one-fourth of those defendants are found "not guilty by reason of insanity."
While most of the publicity about the insanity defense has centered on homicide cases, 60 percent to 70 percent of all insanity pleas are not in homicide cases, studies show.
Defendants themselves don't want to use it because if they are found not guilty by reason of insanity, they may actually spend more time locked up in a mental institution than they would serve in prison if found guilty. Defendants who are found not guilty by reason of insanity are not immediately freed. Before they are released, there must be a finding that they are no longer a danger to themselves or to the community.
There have been several high-profile cases nationally in which defendants have used the insanity defense.
John Hinckley used it to convince a jury that he should not be held criminally responsible for trying to assassinate former President Ronald Reagan 25 years ago. He is still confined in a Washington mental institution, allowed only limited furloughs to visit family members.
Dennis Sweeney, a onetime student of former New York Congressman Allard K. Lowenstein, used the insanity defense to convince a jury not to convict him of slaying Lowenstein in 1980.
Lorena Bobbitt successfully used the insanity defense to convince a jury to acquit her of charges related to cutting off her husband's thingy. She was released after three months of psychiatric evaluation.
But many more high-profile defendants have been unsuccessful at using the insanity defense, even when armed with expert psychiatric evidence: Sirhan Sirhan is still in prison for the 1968 murder of Robert F. Kennedy; serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer was found guilty of a string of grisly murders and dismemberments of boys and young men. Dahmer was later murdered in prison by another inmate. And abortion clinic killer John C. Salvi III committed suicide in prison months after jurors rejected his insanity defense and found him guilty of murdering two receptionists during shooting rampages at Boston-area clinics.
Jurors similarly rejected Jack Ruby's claim of insanity and sent him to prison for killing Lee Harvey Oswald after Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy. Jurors also rejected an insanity defense raised by David Berkowitz, the New York killer known as "Son of Sam" who claimed a neighbor's dog was ordering him to commit slayings. More recently, Kip Kunkel, the 17-year-old who shot 29 people in a school rampage in Oregon in 1998, failed to prove he was insane at the time of the shootings.
MOST CASES in which insanity pleas are raised never come to trial. Since the late 1800s, the Rhode Island Supreme Court has entertained only about 40 appeals from defendants who raised the insanity defense at trial. According to Rhode Island judicial records, out of 2.5 million cases since 1980, there have been just 19 in which a defendant succeeded in being found not guilty by reason of insanity. The 19 cases included 9 charges of assault, 7 of murder and 1 each of breaking and entering, larceny and robbery.
When defendants do raise it at trial, Rhode Island juries -- like juries elsewhere -- have usually rejected such a defense and found the defendant guilty of the crime.
William Sarmento, who admitted killing two children, Frankie Lee Barnes Jr. and Jason Wolf in Providence in 1987, elected to waive a jury trial and was acquitted in 1989 by a Superior Court judge who decided the case on his own. Sarmento is still confined in the forsenic unit at Eleanor Slater Hospital.
In his confession to police, Sarmento, who was 22 at the time, said he was tormented by visions of the devil. Evidence introduced at his trial showed a documented pattern of bizarre, sometimes violent behavior that could be traced back to Sarmento's first years in elementary school. As a teen, he spent months living in sewers, abandoned houses, his family's dog house. He became fascinated by Satan, guns, knives and read the Bible incessantly. His moods and behavior swung unpredictably.
GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY law professor Heathcote Woolsey Wales, an expert in the insanity defense, says that generally, juries are not swayed by this defense, which is often accompanied by dueling opinions from psychiatrists.
"Surveys done 10 to 15 years ago found that many people thought it was a cop-out and used by defendants much more frequently than it was," Wales said in a telephone interview last week. And, he says, while it's never been a popular defense, juries seem increasingly less likely to buy into it.
"Attitudes toward crime have changed," said Wales. "We're in a much more punitive mode than we were 40 years ago. . . . Jurors have their own ideas about what's really crazy and what isn't," and they translate judges' instructions on the law -- whatever it may be in a given state -- "into their own ideas of what is really crazy."
Wales said the other reason the insanity defense has become "progressively more unsuccessful" is because so many states have switched the burden of proof: they now require the defendant to prove insanity rather than make the prosecution prove that the defendant was sane at the time of the alleged offense. Rhode Island, at least since 1904, has put the burden of proof on the defendant.
Gan Fong Chin, who opened fire in the Cathay Terrace restaurant in Warwick and killed four people in 1978, was found incompetent to stand trial for nine years. After he was found competent and went to trial, a jury rejected the defense argument that paranoid schizophrenia rendered him incapable of being held criminally accountable and convicted him of first-degree murder.
Christopher Hightower, a former Sunday-school teacher and self-employed commodities broker who killed the three-member Brendel family of Barrington in 1991, claimed to have a "split personality" but is now serving life without parole for the three murders.
Dr. David A. Barrett, a psychiatrist-in-training at Brown University with a documented history of manic-depressive illness, used the insanity defense to counter the state's charge that he murdered a man at a gas station. But jurors convicted him of second-degree murder, and Superior Court Judge Robert D. Krause -- the same judge who is presiding over the Carpio trial -- sentenced Barrett to serve 30 years in prison. At the sentencing hearing, the judge told Barrett that the shooting of the victim, Joseph A. Silvia, "was motivated by your anger and not by mental instability."
Sol Martinez, who claimed she was suffering from a multiple-personality disorder when she kidnapped a newborn baby from Women & Infants Hospital in 1991, was also convicted by a jury. Krause sentenced her to serve 12 years in prison.
Jurors also rejected the insanity defense plea raised by Frank Moniz, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for the 1990 murder of his wife in Pawtucket. Moniz claimed the killing took place while he was in the throes of an epileptic seizure and that he remembered nothing of the slaying.
THE INSANITY DEFENSE is based on the theory that people who are insane could have formed the intent required to prove a criminal act because they either don't know that act is wrong or cannot control their actions even when they know what they're doing is wrong.
It is a defense that has existed since the 12th century but originally was used as a way for a defendant to receive a pardon or a way to get a lesser sentence -- not a method for a defendant to be found "not guilty" of a crime.
The idea that insanity could bar a defendant's conviction arose in the 1800s in England, when Daniel M'Naghten, a woodworker and paranoid schizophrenic, shot and killed Edward Drummond, secretary to British Prime Minister Robert Peel. M'Naghten believed that he was the target of a conspiracy involving Peel and the pope and went to 10 Downing Street to assassinate Peel. He killed Drummond instead, under the delusion that Drummond was Peel. At trial, a jury found M'Naghten not guilty by reason of insanity.
In criminal cases, the burden is on the prosecution to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. But in Rhode Island and many other states, the burden in an insanity defense is on the defendant to prove lack of criminal responsibility by a fair preponderance of the evidence.
Carpio's lawyers are expected to start presenting their insanity defense this week. He is being tried for two criminal offenses: murdering Detective Sgt. Allen at Providence police headquarters and stabbing 84-year-old Madeline Gatta.
Prosecutors contend that Carpio is a cold-blooded killer who strikes when he perceives weakness in his victims. On April 16, 2005, during an interview about the armed robbery of Gatta, Carpio grabbed Allen's gun away from him and shot and killed him.
While Carpio's defense lawyer, Robert L. Sheketoff, has conceded that Carpio stabbed Gatta and shot Allen, and that there is "overwhelming evidence" against his client, he has told the jurors they should find him not guilty by reason of insanity because he was "nuts, crazy, loony-tunes" at the time of the offenses.
What Carpio's lawyers will have to prove is that it's more likely than not that at the time he killed Allen, Carpio was suffering from a mental disease or defect that rendered him "so substantially impaired" that he was incapable of appreciating the wrongfulness of his conduct or conforming his conduct to the requirements of the law.
AFTER HINCKLEY was acquitted of trying to assassinate Reagan, several states enacted laws that restricted use of the insanity defense by raising the burden of proof for a defendant or that allowed juries to find someone guilty but mentally ill. This would allow a defendant to be sent to prison and undergo psychiatric treatment there, rather than in a mental institution, or to be moved to a prison from a mental hospital when he or she was well enough to be transferred.
Rhode Island's General Assembly considered amending state law to allow a "guilty but mentally ill" verdict, but the bill was never enacted.
However, in the aftermath of the Hinckley acquittal, four states -- Montana, Utah, Idaho and Kansas -- abolished the insanity defense, a practice the U.S. Supreme Court condoned in a 1994 decision. And some states, such as Connecticut, adopted tougher release systems for those defendants who are acquitted of crimes. Howard Zonana, a Yale University psychiatrist and law professor, told The Washington Post in 1998 that Connecticut's tougher release policy doubled the average term acquitted defendants spend in mental institutions and that as a result, the number of insanity pleas had dropped in that state's court system.
One study found that those acquitted based on the insanity defense often spend twice as long institutionalized as defendants convicted of a similar crime spend in prison, and that once released from mental institutions, they may be subjected to longer court oversight than parolees.
MacFadyen, the Providence criminal defense lawyer, says that defense lawyers generally won't raise the insanity defense unless the accused has a documented history of mental illness and there is no plausible alternative defense. He says that most of the time it is raised, the cases don't make it to trial -- either because the prosecutors agree that the defendant isn't criminally responsible or because the case ends in a negotiated agreement in which the defendant agrees to admit guilt in return for a less-than-maximum sentence.
"The vast majority of these kind of cases plead out. They are very few and far between that are litigated to the end," says MacFadyen. Most defense lawyers don't like to use this type of defense -- not just because juries often don't buy it -- but because "if you win, you lose. Your client is civilly committed" in a locked ward that in essence is a jail "and could potentially end up doing as much time or more than" if he or she were convicted of the crime.
"If you go the normal criminal route, you could get parole earlier. There is a finite end to your incarceration," MacFadyen says. He and Wales, the Georgetown professor, say that nowadays, it really doesn't make much sense to assert this type of defense at a trial except in a homicide case where the potential prison sentence could be life, life without parole or the death penalty, which Rhode Island doesn't have.
PROVIDENCE criminal defense lawyer John F. Cicilline is one of the few lawyers in Rhode Island who has been successful in using the insanity defense. He won an acquittal in 1979 for Joseph Raimondo Jr., who was accused of assault with intent to murder his estranged wife and mother-in-law.
Raimondo shot his wife eight times and his mother-in-law twice in a Cranston store that he and his wife operated. Both survived. A Warwick neurologist testified in the trial that Raimondo was suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy and manic depression. There was testimony that Raimondo had tried to strangle his first wife, and when he remarried, he'd shot a pistol into his second wife's pillow and smashed up her car before shooting her and her mother.
Raimondo admitted at his trial that he'd stopped taking medication that had been prescribed for him at Butler Hospital about three months before the shootings. After his acquittal, a Superior Court judge found he was still a danger to himself and/or the community and ordered him held in a locked ward at Eleanor Slater Hospital. Over the objection of the attorney general's office, Raimondo was released less than a year and a half later after a Superior Court judge determined he was no longer dangerous. In 1996, Raimondo hanged himself in the Adult Correctional Institutions after being charged with an armed bank robbery.
Today, Cicilline considers himself lucky that he won an acquittal for Raimondo on the attempted-murder charges.
"I think I won that case for three reasons: The victims did not die. I used a doctor who testified who was brilliant who, through x-rays, was able to diagnose his problem as temporal lobe epilepsy. There was a long, documented history of Raimondo doing peculiar things his entire life -- like eating frozen chicken and raw sugar.
"The third thing I caught a break on" was that the judge who presided over the trial, the late William Mackenzie, told the jurors that if they accepted the insanity defense, Raimondo would not "walk out the door" but would be committed for observation and treatment to a mental institution until the court found he was no longer dangerous.
A year after Raimondo's acquittal, the Rhode Island Supreme Court ruled, in another case, that such a jury instruction was improper and that even though the commitment process takes place, that is part of the sentencing process and not evidence to be considered by a jury.
VIEW A GALLERY of photos from the trial of Esteban Carpio, at:
projo.com/extra/2006/carpio/flash/
Esteban Carpio's plea in the murder of a Providence police detective is made in fewer than 1 percent of U.S. criminal cases and succeeds in only 25 percent of them.
Sunday, June 18, 2006
BY TRACY BRETON
Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE -- The insanity defense, which Esteban Carpio is using to fight the state's charge that he murdered Providence police Detective Sgt. James Allen, is rarely invoked and rarely succeeds.
Defense lawyers use it as "a defense of last resort," says Providence lawyer John A. "Terry" MacFadyen III, a former public defender who specializes in criminal appeals.
Legal experts estimate that the insanity defense is used in less than 1 percent of the criminal cases filed each year in the United States and that even though 90 percent of the defendants who raise the defense have a documented history of mental illness, only one-fourth of those defendants are found "not guilty by reason of insanity."
While most of the publicity about the insanity defense has centered on homicide cases, 60 percent to 70 percent of all insanity pleas are not in homicide cases, studies show.
Defendants themselves don't want to use it because if they are found not guilty by reason of insanity, they may actually spend more time locked up in a mental institution than they would serve in prison if found guilty. Defendants who are found not guilty by reason of insanity are not immediately freed. Before they are released, there must be a finding that they are no longer a danger to themselves or to the community.
There have been several high-profile cases nationally in which defendants have used the insanity defense.
John Hinckley used it to convince a jury that he should not be held criminally responsible for trying to assassinate former President Ronald Reagan 25 years ago. He is still confined in a Washington mental institution, allowed only limited furloughs to visit family members.
Dennis Sweeney, a onetime student of former New York Congressman Allard K. Lowenstein, used the insanity defense to convince a jury not to convict him of slaying Lowenstein in 1980.
Lorena Bobbitt successfully used the insanity defense to convince a jury to acquit her of charges related to cutting off her husband's thingy. She was released after three months of psychiatric evaluation.
But many more high-profile defendants have been unsuccessful at using the insanity defense, even when armed with expert psychiatric evidence: Sirhan Sirhan is still in prison for the 1968 murder of Robert F. Kennedy; serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer was found guilty of a string of grisly murders and dismemberments of boys and young men. Dahmer was later murdered in prison by another inmate. And abortion clinic killer John C. Salvi III committed suicide in prison months after jurors rejected his insanity defense and found him guilty of murdering two receptionists during shooting rampages at Boston-area clinics.
Jurors similarly rejected Jack Ruby's claim of insanity and sent him to prison for killing Lee Harvey Oswald after Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy. Jurors also rejected an insanity defense raised by David Berkowitz, the New York killer known as "Son of Sam" who claimed a neighbor's dog was ordering him to commit slayings. More recently, Kip Kunkel, the 17-year-old who shot 29 people in a school rampage in Oregon in 1998, failed to prove he was insane at the time of the shootings.
MOST CASES in which insanity pleas are raised never come to trial. Since the late 1800s, the Rhode Island Supreme Court has entertained only about 40 appeals from defendants who raised the insanity defense at trial. According to Rhode Island judicial records, out of 2.5 million cases since 1980, there have been just 19 in which a defendant succeeded in being found not guilty by reason of insanity. The 19 cases included 9 charges of assault, 7 of murder and 1 each of breaking and entering, larceny and robbery.
When defendants do raise it at trial, Rhode Island juries -- like juries elsewhere -- have usually rejected such a defense and found the defendant guilty of the crime.
William Sarmento, who admitted killing two children, Frankie Lee Barnes Jr. and Jason Wolf in Providence in 1987, elected to waive a jury trial and was acquitted in 1989 by a Superior Court judge who decided the case on his own. Sarmento is still confined in the forsenic unit at Eleanor Slater Hospital.
In his confession to police, Sarmento, who was 22 at the time, said he was tormented by visions of the devil. Evidence introduced at his trial showed a documented pattern of bizarre, sometimes violent behavior that could be traced back to Sarmento's first years in elementary school. As a teen, he spent months living in sewers, abandoned houses, his family's dog house. He became fascinated by Satan, guns, knives and read the Bible incessantly. His moods and behavior swung unpredictably.
GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY law professor Heathcote Woolsey Wales, an expert in the insanity defense, says that generally, juries are not swayed by this defense, which is often accompanied by dueling opinions from psychiatrists.
"Surveys done 10 to 15 years ago found that many people thought it was a cop-out and used by defendants much more frequently than it was," Wales said in a telephone interview last week. And, he says, while it's never been a popular defense, juries seem increasingly less likely to buy into it.
"Attitudes toward crime have changed," said Wales. "We're in a much more punitive mode than we were 40 years ago. . . . Jurors have their own ideas about what's really crazy and what isn't," and they translate judges' instructions on the law -- whatever it may be in a given state -- "into their own ideas of what is really crazy."
Wales said the other reason the insanity defense has become "progressively more unsuccessful" is because so many states have switched the burden of proof: they now require the defendant to prove insanity rather than make the prosecution prove that the defendant was sane at the time of the alleged offense. Rhode Island, at least since 1904, has put the burden of proof on the defendant.
Gan Fong Chin, who opened fire in the Cathay Terrace restaurant in Warwick and killed four people in 1978, was found incompetent to stand trial for nine years. After he was found competent and went to trial, a jury rejected the defense argument that paranoid schizophrenia rendered him incapable of being held criminally accountable and convicted him of first-degree murder.
Christopher Hightower, a former Sunday-school teacher and self-employed commodities broker who killed the three-member Brendel family of Barrington in 1991, claimed to have a "split personality" but is now serving life without parole for the three murders.
Dr. David A. Barrett, a psychiatrist-in-training at Brown University with a documented history of manic-depressive illness, used the insanity defense to counter the state's charge that he murdered a man at a gas station. But jurors convicted him of second-degree murder, and Superior Court Judge Robert D. Krause -- the same judge who is presiding over the Carpio trial -- sentenced Barrett to serve 30 years in prison. At the sentencing hearing, the judge told Barrett that the shooting of the victim, Joseph A. Silvia, "was motivated by your anger and not by mental instability."
Sol Martinez, who claimed she was suffering from a multiple-personality disorder when she kidnapped a newborn baby from Women & Infants Hospital in 1991, was also convicted by a jury. Krause sentenced her to serve 12 years in prison.
Jurors also rejected the insanity defense plea raised by Frank Moniz, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for the 1990 murder of his wife in Pawtucket. Moniz claimed the killing took place while he was in the throes of an epileptic seizure and that he remembered nothing of the slaying.
THE INSANITY DEFENSE is based on the theory that people who are insane could have formed the intent required to prove a criminal act because they either don't know that act is wrong or cannot control their actions even when they know what they're doing is wrong.
It is a defense that has existed since the 12th century but originally was used as a way for a defendant to receive a pardon or a way to get a lesser sentence -- not a method for a defendant to be found "not guilty" of a crime.
The idea that insanity could bar a defendant's conviction arose in the 1800s in England, when Daniel M'Naghten, a woodworker and paranoid schizophrenic, shot and killed Edward Drummond, secretary to British Prime Minister Robert Peel. M'Naghten believed that he was the target of a conspiracy involving Peel and the pope and went to 10 Downing Street to assassinate Peel. He killed Drummond instead, under the delusion that Drummond was Peel. At trial, a jury found M'Naghten not guilty by reason of insanity.
In criminal cases, the burden is on the prosecution to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. But in Rhode Island and many other states, the burden in an insanity defense is on the defendant to prove lack of criminal responsibility by a fair preponderance of the evidence.
Carpio's lawyers are expected to start presenting their insanity defense this week. He is being tried for two criminal offenses: murdering Detective Sgt. Allen at Providence police headquarters and stabbing 84-year-old Madeline Gatta.
Prosecutors contend that Carpio is a cold-blooded killer who strikes when he perceives weakness in his victims. On April 16, 2005, during an interview about the armed robbery of Gatta, Carpio grabbed Allen's gun away from him and shot and killed him.
While Carpio's defense lawyer, Robert L. Sheketoff, has conceded that Carpio stabbed Gatta and shot Allen, and that there is "overwhelming evidence" against his client, he has told the jurors they should find him not guilty by reason of insanity because he was "nuts, crazy, loony-tunes" at the time of the offenses.
What Carpio's lawyers will have to prove is that it's more likely than not that at the time he killed Allen, Carpio was suffering from a mental disease or defect that rendered him "so substantially impaired" that he was incapable of appreciating the wrongfulness of his conduct or conforming his conduct to the requirements of the law.
AFTER HINCKLEY was acquitted of trying to assassinate Reagan, several states enacted laws that restricted use of the insanity defense by raising the burden of proof for a defendant or that allowed juries to find someone guilty but mentally ill. This would allow a defendant to be sent to prison and undergo psychiatric treatment there, rather than in a mental institution, or to be moved to a prison from a mental hospital when he or she was well enough to be transferred.
Rhode Island's General Assembly considered amending state law to allow a "guilty but mentally ill" verdict, but the bill was never enacted.
However, in the aftermath of the Hinckley acquittal, four states -- Montana, Utah, Idaho and Kansas -- abolished the insanity defense, a practice the U.S. Supreme Court condoned in a 1994 decision. And some states, such as Connecticut, adopted tougher release systems for those defendants who are acquitted of crimes. Howard Zonana, a Yale University psychiatrist and law professor, told The Washington Post in 1998 that Connecticut's tougher release policy doubled the average term acquitted defendants spend in mental institutions and that as a result, the number of insanity pleas had dropped in that state's court system.
One study found that those acquitted based on the insanity defense often spend twice as long institutionalized as defendants convicted of a similar crime spend in prison, and that once released from mental institutions, they may be subjected to longer court oversight than parolees.
MacFadyen, the Providence criminal defense lawyer, says that defense lawyers generally won't raise the insanity defense unless the accused has a documented history of mental illness and there is no plausible alternative defense. He says that most of the time it is raised, the cases don't make it to trial -- either because the prosecutors agree that the defendant isn't criminally responsible or because the case ends in a negotiated agreement in which the defendant agrees to admit guilt in return for a less-than-maximum sentence.
"The vast majority of these kind of cases plead out. They are very few and far between that are litigated to the end," says MacFadyen. Most defense lawyers don't like to use this type of defense -- not just because juries often don't buy it -- but because "if you win, you lose. Your client is civilly committed" in a locked ward that in essence is a jail "and could potentially end up doing as much time or more than" if he or she were convicted of the crime.
"If you go the normal criminal route, you could get parole earlier. There is a finite end to your incarceration," MacFadyen says. He and Wales, the Georgetown professor, say that nowadays, it really doesn't make much sense to assert this type of defense at a trial except in a homicide case where the potential prison sentence could be life, life without parole or the death penalty, which Rhode Island doesn't have.
PROVIDENCE criminal defense lawyer John F. Cicilline is one of the few lawyers in Rhode Island who has been successful in using the insanity defense. He won an acquittal in 1979 for Joseph Raimondo Jr., who was accused of assault with intent to murder his estranged wife and mother-in-law.
Raimondo shot his wife eight times and his mother-in-law twice in a Cranston store that he and his wife operated. Both survived. A Warwick neurologist testified in the trial that Raimondo was suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy and manic depression. There was testimony that Raimondo had tried to strangle his first wife, and when he remarried, he'd shot a pistol into his second wife's pillow and smashed up her car before shooting her and her mother.
Raimondo admitted at his trial that he'd stopped taking medication that had been prescribed for him at Butler Hospital about three months before the shootings. After his acquittal, a Superior Court judge found he was still a danger to himself and/or the community and ordered him held in a locked ward at Eleanor Slater Hospital. Over the objection of the attorney general's office, Raimondo was released less than a year and a half later after a Superior Court judge determined he was no longer dangerous. In 1996, Raimondo hanged himself in the Adult Correctional Institutions after being charged with an armed bank robbery.
Today, Cicilline considers himself lucky that he won an acquittal for Raimondo on the attempted-murder charges.
"I think I won that case for three reasons: The victims did not die. I used a doctor who testified who was brilliant who, through x-rays, was able to diagnose his problem as temporal lobe epilepsy. There was a long, documented history of Raimondo doing peculiar things his entire life -- like eating frozen chicken and raw sugar.
"The third thing I caught a break on" was that the judge who presided over the trial, the late William Mackenzie, told the jurors that if they accepted the insanity defense, Raimondo would not "walk out the door" but would be committed for observation and treatment to a mental institution until the court found he was no longer dangerous.
A year after Raimondo's acquittal, the Rhode Island Supreme Court ruled, in another case, that such a jury instruction was improper and that even though the commitment process takes place, that is part of the sentencing process and not evidence to be considered by a jury.
VIEW A GALLERY of photos from the trial of Esteban Carpio, at:
projo.com/extra/2006/carpio/flash/