Ravenwood - 10/08/04 06:00 AM
"A man on trial for taking a kindergartner hostage leaped up in court Wednesday and slashed his public defender with a razor blade," reports CNN. Despite his injuries, his lawyer still proclaims that this proves his client is not fit to stand trial.
Barbette Williams, 48, of New Orleans was booked with attempted second-degree murder for injuring lawyer Bert Garraway.As a non-lawyer, I think attacking a lawyer doesn't necessarily seem all that irrational. But all kidding aside, I don't get the "not guilty by reason of insanity" defense. I think if you slash anyone with a razor blade you might just be a little crazy. If you do it in front of a jury, it should be all that more easy to convict the loser beyond a reasonable doubt. Besides, if the bailiff had been doing his job, this nutjob would have been carried out in a body bag any way.Williams wrapped his arms around Garraway and cut him above the eye and on the neck just as the defense lawyer was about to rest his case.
Garraway walked out of the courtroom, his shirt red with blood, to go to a hospital for treatment.
"I've contended all along that this guy is nuts, and to be honest, this pretty much confirms it," Garraway said late Wednesday. "... what kind of rational person would attack his own lawyer?"
Category: Dumb Criminals
Comments (2) top link me
Frankly if my name were "Barbette", I'd probably be a little crazy too.
Posted by: roger at October 8, 2004 11:19 AMThe insanity defense exists because our criminal laws are based on moral notions. Wrongdoers are punished for intentionally doing wrong. You can't hold someone morally responsible for wrongdoing if they are too nuts to distinguish right from wrong. However, you can lock them away forever for being nuts and a danger to society.
Except everyone knows they may not stay locked away forever. Therefore, attorneys use the insanity defense only as a last resort when no other defense is possible. Juries are quite likely to ignore the insanity defense law and apply a utilitarian notion of public safety instead - that is, if he kills because he's nuts, he's REALLY dangerous and should be in max security prison forever, or preferably for a short time until he is executed. I'm certainly sympathetic to this common-sense view, but it's quite counter to American legal principles.
I went to school for a couple of years with a guy that I was quite convinced wasn't just a huge, vicious bully, but was actually a full-blown psychopath that hadn't worked up the nerve to start a killing spree yet. (By the way, a psychopath lacks a conscience but IMO doesn't qualify for legally unable to "tell right from wrong." He quite well understood what we considered right and wrong, and made sure his over-the-top bullying was never witnessed by anyone with real power.) Then he murdered someone and pled insanity. 10 years later, I caught a news report with his name in it, described as a "recently released mental patient" - he had killed five more people.
Psychopaths are great actors (completely lacking a conscience or notions of objective truth helps, I suppose). School authorities and adults in general had a totally different picture of this guy than his fellow students did. He kept his nasty side completely hidden from anyone with the power to do anything about it for many years, until he got caught with a dead body. Then he faked schizophrenia quite convincingly. Later, he must have faked recovery well enough to fool a panel of psychiatrists.
This experience will probably get me rejected "for cause" if I ever wind up on a capital case jury panel. Unless no one is smart enough to ask the right question.....
Posted by: markm at October 9, 2004 6:56 PM(c) Ravenwood and Associates, 1990 - 2014
