Jan. 20
TEXAS:
Juries sometimes face impossible choices
It's been a quarter of a century since Candace Montgomery hacked Betty
Gore to death with an axe. You may recall that Mrs. Montgomery had an
affair with Mrs. Gore's husband and Mrs. Gore had gone to confront her.
Ms. Montgomery claimed self defense. A jury acquitted her after a
sensational murder trial, the last held in the old Collin County
Courthouse in McKinney.
She had hit Mrs. Gore 41 times with that axe, then wiped up the blood and
pretended nothing happened.
Now we have an even more gruesome killing to deal with in Collin County.
In an apparent fit of postpartum depression, Plano mother Dena Schlosser
cut off her baby's arms and calmly watched her bleed to death. Mrs.
Schlosser probably will plead insanity, and my guess is she will get off,
too. Her court-appointed attorney is quoted as saying, "If this isn't a
case where she's not guilty by reason of insanity, I'll eat my hat." It
does seem obvious. Only a mentally ill woman would do such a thing.
Jurors won't have very good options, though. The death penalty probably
won't seem appropriate to them in a case like this. Texas doesn't have a
"life without parole" statute; legislators don't want to give jurors that
alternative. The trouble with the insanity defense is that doctors could
treat it and release her. She will already have been found not guilty of
murder.
In any case the jury will be making a judgment they are poorly qualified
for. Jurors won't be dealing with fact, only opinion. Doubtless more
details will come out, but what facts there are seem to be pretty clear
already. The critical issue will be Mrs. Schlosser's state of mind.
Jurors will have no way of knowing for sure whether she is or was insane.
Experts will disagree, and jurors will be left with their own feelings and
impressions ... and doubts. I expect they will all be civic-minded
citizens and will make the best decision they can in good conscience. They
will try to do their duty under the law, such as it is.
In the Montgomery case, the jury also had to answer the unanswerable: Did
Betty Gore attack or threaten Mrs. Montgomery physically?
Only Mrs. Montgomery knew the truth. Jurors were left with reasonable
doubt and voted to acquit.
The community was outraged, but what were they supposed to do? Go against
their collective conscience? 2 reporters researched and chronicled the
story in a book, Evidence of Love. Despite the awful title, I hear it's
pretty good. The last chapter is entitled "Outrage." In 1990, it was made
into a TV movie starring Brian Dennehy and Barbara Hershey.
I think about that case every time I pass the Como Motel on Central
Expressway where Mrs. Montgomery and Allan Gore (yep, Al Gore) had their
trysts.
Pat Montgomery stood by his wife through the trial. Afterward, they
changed their name and moved to Atlanta. I lost track of them. Allan Gore
married a neighbor less than a year later and moved to Silicon Valley. His
daughters finally went to live with Betty's parents in Kansas. By all
reports they turned out all right.
Like Pat Montgomery, John Schlosser is standing by his wife. So are her
parents. They have already had a terrible experience and it isn't going to
get any better for them until long after this trial is over, assuming
there is one.
But it's the jury I sympathize with. They face impossible choices and, as
I said, my best guess is they will be left with enough doubt that they
will have to vote to acquit. As in the earlier case, the community will be
outraged. I don't envy those jurors at all.
(source: Dallas Morning News)
***********************
Psycho Mom----Lisa Diaz had to save her "precious babies" from an evil
world. She drowned them.
A man shrieks at the top of his lungs: "Please 911 PLEASE I need an
ambulance!"
Clutching a cell phone and pacing through his house, the man roars with
primal anger and pain. "Please help me--hurry--I'm right down the street
from the fire station...My wife, I don't know what the fuck she did to my
daughters...they are dead...hurry, hurry, please hurry, HURRY!"
After working all day, Plano executive Angel Diaz arrived home on
September 25, 2003, at about 6:35 p.m. The garage door got stuck halfway
up, so he crawled under it and saw his wife, Lisa, at the door into their
house. She looked strange. "Something happened to the girls," Lisa
whispered. "I didn't want them to suffer."
Confused, Angel walked through the house looking for Briana, 6, and
Kamryn, 3. He found their bodies on the bed in the master bedroom--naked,
wet, covered with a blanket--and raced for the phone.
The voice of the male dispatcher breaks through Diaz's screams: "Sir, are
they conscious?"
"No, they're unconscious. There's shit coming out of their mouths. I don't
know what the fuck my wife did...get your ass over here...please
hurry...Oh, GAAAAAWWWWD, PLEASE!"
Pacing through the house into the garage, Diaz turns his fury on Lisa,
who'd climbed into her Durango and was sitting in it with the door open.
"Oh, God, you should have seen a fucking psychiatrist!" he yells. "You
deserve to die! You fucking stupid idiot!"
As the dispatcher tries to talk him through performing CPR on the
children, Angel's voice turns pleading, begging over and over, "Please
mama, please mama, please wake up, please, please...don't go baby, don't
go baby, please..."
Angel Diaz screams and begs, furious at his wife as well as the
paramedics, who take 7 long minutes to arrive. The last thing heard on the
tape is Angel screaming at Lisa: "What did you do to them? What did you do
to them?"
That would soon be clear to the paramedics. The two little girls had been
drowned. Their mother was bleeding from self-inflicted stab wounds to her
chest, neck and arms. She had tried to pierce her heart.
Arrested and charged with capital murder, Lisa Diaz, 33, joined a string
of moms in high-profile Texas cases who'd been accused of the brutal
murders of their children.
Only 4 months earlier, 39-year-old Deanna Laney of Tyler had been arrested
for killing 2 sons and maiming a third by bashing their heads with rocks.
In 2001, Houston's Andrea Yates, 37, drowned her 5 children in a bathtub.
And in November, Dena Schlosser, 35, also of Plano, became the latest
killer mom. She admitted cutting off her infant daughter's arms at the
shoulder.
No responsible authority is calling this a trend; mothers aren't
necessarily killing their children with any more frequency than they did a
decade ago. But the Diaz, Yates and Laney cases could change the way the
insanity defense is applied in Texas. Yates, like Laney and Diaz, pleaded
not guilty by reason of insanity, a rarely used and controversial plea.
The insanity defense is a gamble: Jurors often view the mental health
profession with suspicion, fearing killers will fake mental illness to
avoid prison or execution. Killers like Kenneth Pierott, 27, of Beaumont,
give support to those fears: Acquitted by reason of insanity for the 1996
beating death of his sister, Pierott was charged last April with the
murder of a 6-year-old boy found dead in an oven.
Though Yates had a long history of schizophrenia and postpartum psychosis,
a jury convicted her of murdering three of her children and sentenced her
to life in prison. They relied in part on testimony from renowned forensic
psychiatrist Park Dietz, who testified for the prosecution that Yates was
not legally insane at the time she killed her kids.
The Yates case prompted a new look at the Texas insanity statute, which
holds that defendants are not guilty if they didn't "know" their actions
were "wrong." The state, however, doesn't define those words. Efforts to
clarify those terms have been proposed to the state Legislature by a loose
coalition of legal experts and mental health advocates.
This month, the debate got a boost from the 1st Court of Appeals in
Houston, which overturned Yates' conviction. The court ruled that Dietz
gave false testimony about an episode of the TV show Law & Order in which
a woman drowned her kids and escaped punishment by pleading insanity. The
problem: No such episode existed. Dietz's error, the court held, could
have implied to the jury that the show influenced Yates.
The case of Lisa Ann Diaz offers a rare and intimate glimpse into the mind
of a psychotic killer mom. Unlike Yates, Diaz was acquitted, deemed not
guilty by reason of insanity. Even though she hadn't received treatment
before the slayings, six experts agreed that she was in a delusional
psychotic state when she killed. She believed that people in the
neighborhood were watching her, that evil spirits were in her house and
that voices were telling her that she and her daughters were going to die
a slow and painful death.
If Yates is granted a new trial, jurors will be faced with much the same
testimony about her mental state, this time without Dietz. But they won't
see what jurors did in the Diaz case: 12 hours of videotapes taken of Lisa
in the weeks following her arrest, before anti-psychotic medication
stabilized her condition.
Though police made a videotape of the Yates crime scene--including the
five dead children--they never recorded Yates. If they had, the jurors
would have seen a pathetic, disoriented woman. Would the jury have
rendered a different verdict if it had seen Yates in the state she was in
just hours or days after she'd drowned her kids?
In contrast to the Yates case, jurors at the Lisa Diaz trial saw directly
inside her harrowing world, where germs and worms and evil spirits
tormented Diaz and her children. The morning of the slayings, the signs
and omens had become clear: So Diaz did what any good mother would do. She
set out to save her precious babies.
Wearing dark jail coveralls, Lisa Diaz perches uneasily on a chair, her
long black hair parted on the side and hanging past her shoulders. Behind
her is a white cinder-block wall of the Collin County Detention Center.
The camera frame captures her face and upper body and remains fixed at the
same distance throughout eight videos. Her male interrogator is unseen. A
pretty, waif-like Latina with a wide, full mouth, a strong nose and brown
eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, Lisa listens with suspicion as Dallas
psychologist Dr. Jaye Crowder explains that he is there at the request of
her court-appointed attorney, Steve Miller. It has been three weeks since
Lisa's arrest, and Miller wants to have his client examined as soon after
the events as possible. Lisa agrees to the interview in a soft voice.
She seems subdued, unexpressive but lucid. Over 12 hours of interviews,
Lisa will eventually describe why and how she killed her children. Her
voice will fade to a whisper, as if she's afraid guards will overhear. By
tape 8, when Dr. Crowder presses her for details about the killings, Lisa
stares at the floor, rocks back and forth, licks and bites her lips and
obsessively rubs one shoulder. She pauses and mumbles and stares, then
breaks down in wrenching sobs.
Dr. Crowder's interview began simply enough: Describe how you grew up.
Born in 1970 and abandoned soon after by her mother, Lisa and her sister
Michelle were raised by their great-grandmother until Lisa was 4. After
the great-grandmother's death, the girls lived with their great-aunt,
where they felt rejected. Their mother, Rosemary Cano, remarried and came
to get them when Lisa was 9.
Her mother seemed "like a stranger," and the girls had trouble adjusting
to her ways. Lisa had no contact with her father until a visit when she
was a teenager. Lisa's stepfather, whom Lisa liked, left after four or 5
years.
Lisa admits that her mother probably should have left them with the
great-aunt. As bad as her great-aunt's home was, Cano's household was
worse. "You look a little tearful again," Dr. Crowder says. "Do you
remember crying about it?"
"Yeah, at the beginning," Lisa says, taking off her glasses to wipe away
tears.
Lisa's childhood unhappiness gave way to a troubled teenage life. Never a
disciplinary problem, Lisa made good grades in school until ninth grade,
when she got pregnant and dropped out. She later earned a GED. Her first
husband, David Sanchez, was controlling and jealous, she says. Lisa gave
birth at age 17 to their daughter, Misty. A year later, in 1988, she had
another child, whom she gave up for adoption. She married Sanchez when she
was 19. The couple had many problems: Sanchez was ordered to attend anger
management classes, and Lisa was prescribed Prozac for panic attacks.
After several separations, they divorced in 1996.
Angel Diaz, whom Lisa met in Dallas at her job, was a godsend. Stable,
well-educated, kind, he worked in quality control management. "He was just
like the type of person that I had imagined for myself," Lisa says. They
married in 1997, two days before Briana was born; Kamryn followed in 2000.
After Briana's birth, Lisa became a stay-at-home mom. Though Lisa admits
that she sometimes yelled at her children, she says she couldn't bring
herself to spank them. She'd endured too much of that as a child.
They seemed a happy couple. But like many blended families, the Diazes had
arguments about disciplining 16-year-old Misty and Angel's 9-year-old son
from a previous relationship. But what upset Lisa most was when Angel
called her a hypochondriac.
Dr. Crowder spends hours quizzing Lisa about her many physical ailments.
They began, Lisa says, with a flu shot in January 2002.
"Driving home, I got a horrible, horrible headache...one of the worst
headaches I've ever had," Lisa says. "I kept telling everybody that it was
[after] that flu shot that I started having all these symptoms...And then
the other thing that happened was, I started to feel...like kind of
scared, paranoid."
Lisa recounts a litany of complaints: stiff joints, headaches, pain in her
kidneys, numbness, intense thirst, chills, sinusitis, fatigue, sore
throats, weight loss and insomnia. Some of her symptoms were bizarre:
She'd lie down to go to sleep and feel the backs of her eyes "shaking."
A few of the ailments could be readily identified: carpal tunnel syndrome
and an injured ankle that resulted in surgery after Briana was born. But
after the flu shot, Lisa visited multiple physicians--including an
endocrinologist, rheumatologist, gynecologist, dermatologist, neurologist
and orthopedist--to find out what was wrong with her. They ran blood tests
and MRIs but could find no physiological cause of her pain.
One morning in February 2002, she awoke early feeling "like somebody was
pushing on my head," she says. "And then, like my joints started hurting
again, and I felt like I was going to pass out." She drove herself to a
hospital where she was treated for dehydration.
A few days later, feeling she was having a heart attack, Lisa made another
ER visit, calling paramedics when Angel refused to take her. She describes
the attending physician as "really, really rude." After suggesting she
might have a ruptured cyst, the doctor did a "really rough and hard"
vaginal exam.
"[He] started doing all kinds of things down there, like, I could feel
him, like, rubbing...he never even told me whether I had a ruptured cyst
or not; he never even mentioned it." The doctor's diagnosis was "Oh,
you're just having a panic attack." He prescribed an anti-anxiety
medication.
Lisa was indignant. "I told him, 'I was asleep when all this
happened...I'm not having a panic attack.' And he didn't want to hear
anything I had to say to him." Lisa became convinced that the ER doctor
had left something inside her. "It just seemed like for some reason he
wanted to, like, somehow hurt me," Lisa says.
Doctors prescribed medications for Lisa; worried about side effects, she
rarely took them. She tells Dr. Crowder that one antibiotic "made me
really thirsty, and it made me...feel like my body was swelling up and
like I couldn't go to the bathroom and like my tongue was...getting fat
and my face looked fat...And it made me really paranoid and scared.
"If I'd go somewhere, people were staring at me and stuff," she continued.
"And I had even told my husband...when I go to pick up my daughter from
school, there's this lady...she always keeps turning around like that and
she keeps looking at me, and I don't know why she keeps doing that."
She denies hearing voices of God or Satan or demons but admits that during
an MRI scan of her spine, she heard the machine talking.
"What did it seem like it was saying?" Dr. Crowder asks.
"Open up," Lisa says.
Scouring the Internet for information about her symptoms, Lisa became
convinced at various times that she had lupus, mad cow disease, internal
worms, seizures, multiple sclerosis, thyroid dysfunction, tuberculosis and
diabetes. She brushed off any suggestion that her symptoms were
psychological, not physical. Lisa turned to alternative medicine,
including acupuncture, Chinese herbs and homeopathic remedies.
Between January 2002 and September 2003, Lisa made 90 visits to doctors or
alternative therapists for treatment. Her obsessive fear of germs grew
worse. She washed her hands 10 times an hour. Convinced she suffered from
ringworm contracted from her mother, Lisa noticed rashes on her daughters
as well.
To cure the ringworm, Lisa began laundering the family's linens daily and
spraying Lysol on everything they touched: doorknobs, light switches,
faucets, mattresses, even pillowcases. Some things were so contaminated,
she thought--such as pillows and hairbrushes--that she threw them away.
For the rashes, Lisa rubbed mustard seed and papaya on the girls' skin and
made them drink Chinese herb potions.
Lisa's feelings coincided with other pressures in her life. She defended
Misty's problems in school and her adoption of Goth-style clothing against
Angel's criticism. Lisa felt Angel couldn't see that his son bullied
Briana and Kamryn. Most of all, Lisa felt angry that Angel wasn't taking
her physical symptoms seriously. Angel would later testify that he "blew
off" his wife's constant complaints.
Nothing Lisa did soothed her fears. Seeing similar symptoms in her
children, Lisa believed she'd passed on her illnesses to them. Though not
a churchgoer, Lisa felt there was a spiritual dimension to their
sufferings. She turned to the Internet to learn about Kabbalah, a form of
Jewish mysticism.
There she found concrete remedies. Lisa fashioned bracelets from red
string and slipped them on the children's wrists, as recommended in
Kabbalah to ward off the "evil eye"--negative energies transferred from
the unkind stares of others. Lisa saw those kinds of looks from her
neighbors, at school, when shopping.
To banish the evil spirits in her house, Kabbalah recommended sage. Lisa
purchased the herb at a health food store and burned it throughout her
home while reciting a mystical blessing. She washed her bad dreams off her
hands each morning in the manner prescribed by Kabbalah.
On September 2, 2003, a frustrated Angel accompanied Lisa on yet another
visit to Dr. Eduardo Wilkinson, a Richardson internist she'd seen several
times before, beginning a year earlier. He would later testify that Lisa
looked different during this visit: more anxious, very upset.
"She was deteriorating," Wilkinson said. "She was definitely worried about
something." It could have been Angel's new job, which required travel.
Lisa felt vulnerable to danger when her husband was gone.
After spending 40 minutes with her, Wilkinson suggested her problems were
psychosomatic and referred her to Dallas psychiatrist Doyle Carson. Lisa
agreed to follow up, but she never did. Her pain was physical, Lisa
insisted to her husband, not in her head. Fed up, Angel refused to listen.
The day before the murders, Lisa threw away Misty's hairbrush, believing
it was ringworm-infested. She remembers feeling anxious. "I believe we had
to go to the Laundromat that day to go wash the blankets again," Lisa
says.
That night, Lisa gave Briana some of the Chinese herbs to drink. The
little girl balked. Angel, observing all of this, became angry.
"That's when he said that I needed to see a psychiatrist, because he said
there's nothing wrong with them," Lisa tells Dr. Crowder on the videotape.
"I thought that he was the one that needed the psychiatrist, because he
couldn't see the things that were obvious."
About 6 weeks after the killings, Angel Diaz visited the McKinney law
office of Darlina Crowder. The attorney was impressed: Well-groomed,
handsome, wearing a business suit, Diaz seemed like a successful
executive. But he was still distraught. The 1st 2 times they met, Angel
started bawling as he talked about his daughters.
"He didn't come in to hire me, but to get advice," says Ms. Crowder, who
is also Hispanic (she is not related to psychologist Jaye Crowder). Angel
wasn't happy with Steve Miller. Angel "wanted someone to keep in contact
with him on a daily basis," Crowder says. Reassuring him that Miller was
an excellent lawyer, Ms. Crowder sent Diaz on his way. But Diaz returned,
determined to change counsel.
"As far as Angel was concerned, Lisa was a great mother," Ms. Crowder
says. "He was devastated that his daughters were gone. But he loved his
wife. To him, there were no signs that she would actually kill her
children. He didn't come in and say, 'My wife is crazy.' He said, 'I don't
know what happened. She's a good wife, a good mother. I come home, and my
kids are dead.'" Lisa's oldest daughter, Misty, was supportive of her
mother, too.
The Diazes didn't have financial problems or lots of debt. No one was
having an affair. A mother of three children, Ms. Crowder had one thought:
"Any mother who killed her kids has to have something wrong with her."
At that point, Ms. Crowder had been practicing law for 6 years. For such a
big case, she had to bring in Robert Udashen. That afternoon, Ms. Crowder
and Diaz drove to Dallas to meet with her mentor.
Udashen had made national headlines in October 1980 when he and veteran
McKinney attorney Don Crowder successfully defended Candy Montgomery in
the ax murder of Betty Gore. Their strategy was self-defense, not
insanity. Gore had confronted Montgomery about an affair with Gore's
husband and attacked first. The self-defense scenario, however, was
problematic: Montgomery had struck Gore 41 times.
Udashen hired a psychologist to evaluate Montgomery. He determined she had
flashed back to a childhood trauma and lost control when Gore told her,
"Ssshhh." The case would eventually become the subject of a book and a
movie.
It was Don Crowder, Darlina's father-in-law, who inspired her to go to law
school. Days after Darlina passed the bar exam in November 1998, Don
committed suicide. Ms. Crowder says that some people blamed his death on
the Montgomery case. She doesn't.
"I think he was extremely proud he won the case," she says, "but I don't
think he realized the severity of public reaction. A lot of the people in
this county didn't care for him anymore."
After Don Crowder's death, Ms. Crowder turned to Udashen when she needed
advice. (She divorced Don's son in 2002.)
Boyish and athletic, Udashen, 51, doesn't look much older than he did when
he defended Montgomery. Since that case, he's developed a reputation as a
lawyer's lawyer--great in the courtroom, good at appellate work and an
excellent teacher--but before the Diaz trial, he'd handled only 2 insanity
cases. He lost one; the other didn't make it to trial.
In Texas, the "not guilty by reason of insanity" defense is raised in less
than 1 % of all felony cases. And only 26 % of the cases in which it is
raised result in a NGRI verdict.
Texas Penal Code section 8.01 states: It is an affirmative defense to
prosecution that, at the time of the conduct charged, the actor, as a
result of severe mental disease or defect, did not know that his conduct
was wrong. Though many criminals have mental conditions, the problem is
the definition of two words, know and wrong.
According to University of Texas law professor George Dix, the
right-or-wrong standard dates back to 1843, in the so-called M'Naghten
case. British woodworker Daniel M'Naghten shot and killed a secretary
during his assassination attempt on the prime minister. He was acquitted;
doctors said that he suffered from what would now be called "delusions of
persecution symptomatic of paranoid schizophrenia." Under M'Naghten, if
the accused is unable to tell the difference between right and wrong at
the time of the crime, he should be acquitted.
In the 1960s, a second "volitional" prong was added to Texas law,
absolving a defendant if he acted on an "irresistible impulse." But after
the acquittal of John Hinckley for the attempted assassination of
President Ronald Reagan in 1982, more than 30 states, including Texas,
eliminated that prong and tightened their insanity defense standards.
"Texas has one of the more restrictive definitions in the country,"
Udashen says. Periodically, the state Legislature looks at changing the
law to "guilty but insane" but has taken no action.
As Udashen and Ms. Crowder talked to Angel, they became convinced that
insanity was Lisa's only defense.
"On the other hand," Udashen says, "I knew what happened to Andrea Yates.
That looked like a classic insanity case. And they lost. Lisa Diaz didn't
have any of that. I knew it would be hard, but there was no other defense
to raise."
Ms. Crowder took on the role Udashen had played years earlier, working
with Lisa and other witnesses. Udashen focused on evidence and trial
strategy. He had a risky decision to make: whether to use the videotapes
of Lisa.
"If I decided not to use them, the jury wouldn't see them," Udashen says.
"There was a lot of good stuff for me but also some bad things. In the
first tape, she can answer questions. She doesn't seem insane." And on the
last tape, when the questioner asks Lisa if she would have killed her
children if a police officer had been present, she answers no. That might
indicate to the jury that Lisa knew what she'd done was wrong.
While Udashen struggled with those questions, he brought in psychiatrist
Doyle Carson and clinical psychologist Rycke Marshall to probe deeper
inside Lisa's world.
Quizzing prospective jurors for the Lisa Diaz capital murder trial last
August, Udashen and Ms. Crowder realized they were facing tough odds.
"People were saying, 'I would never find someone not guilty by reason of
insanity if they killed their kids,'" Udashen says. "People didn't like
the insanity defense. They didn't like psychiatrists and psychologists.
They felt there were no standards." The judge excluded 40 of about 70
potential jurors for cause.
Lisa had remained on and off suicide watch. In January, Carson began
treating her with anti-psychotic medications as well as anti-depressants.
Though Lisa showed some improvement, she remained paranoid and suicidal as
the psychiatrist struggled to find the right treatment approach.
Carson says psychiatry used to regard psychotic delusions such as Lisa's
as psychologically based. He no longer believes that. "If someone is
psychotic, I think it is a biological condition," Carson says. "I think it
was a biochemical reaction operating inside of her. Things went awry
somewhere in the central nervous system. I don't see people recovering
from that kind of condition without medication."
Though the state wasn't seeking the death penalty, Lisa faced an automatic
life sentence if convicted. Her psychotic fog had lifted enough for Lisa
to contemplate her future. "She worried about ending up like Andrea
Yates," Udashen says.
Udashen thought the surprising acquittal of Deanna Laney, whose Tyler
trial in March 2004 was covered by Court TV, made his job harder. "I heard
this from the jury panel: 'It's not right; she [Laney] got off,'" Udashen
says. "There's this backlash that I had to deal with."
The defense team's confidence went up right before trial when 2 experts
appointed by the judge filed their reports, offering the same diagnosis as
the four expert defense witnesses: Lisa, at the time of the crime, was
suffering from severe depression with delusional psychosis.
Tests run by psychologist Robert Lovitt indicated Lisa wasn't
"malingering," or exaggerating her mental illness. She scored a "0" on a
test for psychopathic traits, "indicating that she is not a callous,
uncaring, manipulative and impulsive individual." Lovitt's conclusion: "It
is highly likely that she was out of control and not adequately aware of
the nature and implications of her alleged homicidal behavior."
Udashen spent hours studying the Yates case. "Because she had a lot of
psychiatric treatment, they had a lot of different doctors who weren't
consistent, and it was confusing for the jury," Udashen says. "The doctors
I hired and the doctors appointed by the court were all consistent."
The defense got its biggest shock as the trial opened: Collin County
prosecutor Greg Davis opted at the last minute to try Lisa only for the
murder of Briana--meaning that if she was acquitted, Lisa could later be
tried for Kamryn's death. It was the same strategy used in the Yates case.
Arguing that Lisa resented her husband and wanted to punish him, Davis
called a paramedic and a nurse to testify about Lisa's demeanor after her
arrest, attempting to show that she didn't meet the legal definition of
insanity because she knew her actions were wrong. She didn't answer the
door when her mother and Misty knocked. Lisa told Angel something "bad"
had happened to the children. She told a jailer, "I'm so ashamed of what I
did."
Subpoenaed by the prosecution to testify about going to her daughter's
house that day and finding the doors locked and the blinds drawn, Cano
painted Lisa's childhood in glowing terms.
After the prosecution rested, Ms. Crowder says, "some of the jurors looked
like they hated us."
When psychologist Rycke Marshall met Lisa Diaz for the first time in
December 2003, she saw a fragile, almost gaunt young woman. She'd lost 30
pounds in jail.
"I'm not sure I've ever been in the presence of someone whose pain was so
palpable," Marshall says.
A stylish woman with close-cropped blond hair, Marshall spent five years
in the late '70s as chief psychologist at Terrell State Hospital, where
she was asked to testify in criminal trials. She now has a private
practice in North Dallas. Of the 4 psychologists and psychiatrists who
testified in Lisa's trial, Marshall's testimony lasted the longest.
In addition to reviewing the tapes and interviewing family members,
Marshall spent about 20 hours talking to Lisa. "Andrea Yates would become
immobile and non-functioning," Marshall says. "Lisa was quietly psychotic.
She had a delusional disorder that is very unusual."
In all her years of practice, Marshall says, Lisa is the only patient she
encountered who had no one she called mother. "It tells me about the
absence of stability and predictability and healthy attachments in her
life," Marshall says.
Contrary to her mother's rosy account, Lisa's childhood was a nightmare of
abandonment and extreme emotional deprivation, Marshall testified. At her
great-aunt's home, Michelle and Lisa slept on the floor. When she was 4,
Lisa claimed, her great-aunt tried to smother her with a pillow. From then
until she was 10 years old, Lisa often wet her bed and as punishment was
sent to school in urine-soaked clothes.
When her mother came back into Lisa's life, she seemed like a stranger.
"Lisa was very hopeful that her mother is coming to rescue her and
Michelle," Marshall says, "but come to find out, it's at least as bad."
Marshall would testify that Rosemary Cano was high-strung and demanding.
The girls often went without food or clothes.
"The mother gets involved in drugs, leaving them in the car while she's in
the clubs," Marshall says. "The girls are pretty much left to their own
devices." Cano later spent time in prison on a drug charge.
Never part of her life, Lisa's father also did prison time. Showing up
when she was 13, Lisa's father took his daughter for visitation, got drunk
and forced her to perform oral sex on him. Marshall says that when Lisa
talked about her father, "she was very sad, very frightened and very
anxious, as if it said something bad about her." A bizarre visit by her
father to the jail after Lisa's arrest, in fact, triggered a suicidal
episode.
During her abusive 1st marriage, Marshall says, Lisa began to manifest
depression, anxiety and a preoccupation with physical problems.
"When people are confused and have feelings they can't make sense of, they
look for an anchor somewhere to explain it," Marshall says. "She has been
abandoned so many times I imagine she has had this kind of depression all
her life. When people begin to be delusional, they focus on some false
belief. That becomes the glue that holds them together."
Though things improved when she married Angel, Lisa still faced the
ordinary pressures of life: marital conflict, child-rearing problems and
illness. Lisa fixated on the physical to explain her misery.
"There's the hope if it's something physical, it can be fixed," Marshall
says. "Of course, the flu shot had nothing to do with it. It simply
coincided with a time she was feeling bad. As she became more and more
depressed, which is partly a biological process, she became more and more
focused on it being a physical problem until she developed a full-blown
delusional disorder."
In the week before Lisa killed, Marshall says, she started drinking her
own urine, a bizarre remedy she read about on the Internet.
"The things she does over time are more and more unusual and psychotic,"
Marshall says. "Then we're into omens and voices in her head telling her,
'You have to die.'" When Marshall asked Lisa who or what the voices were,
she replied: "It was like the voice of doom."
After Laney's acquittal, Udashen sought advice from the Tyler woman's
attorney. "They had a videotape that Dr. [Phillip] Resnick had made of
Laney," Udashen says. "He convinced me that if I had that, to use it." The
tapes would give Lisa a way to testify without going on the witness stand
and would allow the jury to see her state of mind.
During Lisa's trial, Udashen played excerpts from each tape. At first Lisa
is coherent, but she disintegrates in tapes 7 and 8 as the questions focus
on the day she killed her children.
After driving Briana to kindergarten and buying a new hairbrush to replace
the one she'd tossed, Lisa took Misty to school. When her daughter pointed
out two crows on the lawn, Lisa took them as an omen that she and the
girls must die that day.
At home, Lisa straightened up the house. Voices in her head said, "This is
the day you have to do it. Today's the day you have to die." The family
dog wouldn't come to her. Another sign.
But Lisa didn't make the final decision until she talked to Angel on the
phone that afternoon. He told her about a child who could talk to family
members killed in a car accident. To Lisa, that was the final signal.
Lisa piled Kamryn into the Durango, and they drove to Target. She bought
pillows to replace those she'd thrown away, a "Polly Pocket" toy pool and
dolls for each little girl, and three kitchen knives.
At home, Kamryn played with her toy. At 2:45 p.m., Lisa went to school to
pick up Briana, who also came home and played with her toy. Lisa noticed
dark circles under Briana's eyes, a sign she was terribly sick.
"And after Briana played with the toy?" Dr. Crowder asks on the
viedeotape.
Lisa's answers are whispered, often inaudible. Tears stream as she
describes drawing water in the tub in the bathroom off the master bedroom,
telling Briana she needed a bath. Lisa sobs as she describes how she
brushed the sage over Briana's body and said a prayer--"Dear God, please
take care of my precious angel"--and pushed her under.
"Can you remember what was in your mind at that time?"
"I just felt that I had to save them," she whimpers.
"What were you saving them from?"
"So they wouldn't have to suffer anymore."
"What kind of suffering?"
"From their health and..."
"Health and what?"
Lisa's eyes glaze over. "Just because..." She rocks and rubs her shoulder,
unable to answer.
"What else were you protecting them from...Was it the demons?"
"It was just the evil spirits. I had to save them...I was scared."
Lisa tells how she put Briana on the bed and covered her with a blanket,
then ran water for Kamryn. She repeated her prayer and drowned Kamryn.
With her dead children lying on her bed, Lisa got the knives she'd bought
at Target, stripped and entered the shower. Lisa stabbed herself 20 times
in the chest, stomach, neck and wrists before giving up. She later
required 37 stitches.
With eight minutes left on the tape, Crowder asks Lisa, "Is there anything
else you want to tell us?"
"I wish this had never happened," she whispers.
"What is most on your mind when you say you wished it had never happened?"
She looks up in anguish. "Because I miss them so much."
The jury took 12 hours to find Lisa Diaz not guilty by reason of insanity.
At first the jurors were split, and they spent most of their deliberations
watching the videos. "The tape let them see her say why she did it,"
Udashen says. On the 2nd day, the last holdout juror voted not guilty.
Concerned about the discrepancy in the Yates and Laney verdicts despite
the similar evidence, the Texas Senate Jurisprudence Committee held a
hearing in 2004 on changing the insanity defense statute to include
"guilty but insane" as a possible jury charge. Other changes to broaden
the legal definition of insanity--taking into account the current
understanding of severe mental illness--have been proposed, but for now
have gone nowhere.
Under Texas law, someone found NGRI is subject to commitment in a state
hospital. How long Lisa stays is up to trial court Judge Mark Rusch. She
now lives at the Vernon campus of the North Texas State Hospital, the same
facility where Laney is being treated. The two women have met.
Yates remains in a prison psychiatric unit despite the appellate court
ruling overturning her sentence. The Harris County District Attorney's
Office has said it will appeal.
"I don't think these 3 women were that different," says UT professor Dix.
"Although there were differences, it didn't bring to bear on their
culpability or blameworthiness, whatever Park Dietz thinks."
Udashen worries how Lisa will cope once she understands her actions. "It's
a Catch-22 to bring them out of their mental illness so that they realize
what they've done."
The Diaz jury was told that 500 women a year kill their offspring. "It's
not so rare," Darlina Crowder says. "We just don't hear about it all the
time."
Between them, Yates, Laney and Diaz killed 9 children.
(source: Dallas Observer)
********************
Juan Vela cleared in shootings----Jury finds man, 25, not guilty
Capital murder defendant Juan Vela was found not guilty Wednesday of the
execution-style shooting deaths of two teens last year.
Vela, 25, has been in jail for nearly a year but was released Wednesday
after the jury contemplated his fate for nearly 20 hours during the last 3
days.
Vela, wearing a dark suit, blue shirt and blue silk tie, appeared to cry
and his chin quivered as District Judge Sandra Watts read the verdict. He
hugged his family after the verdict was read.
"I just want to go home," Vela said.
His parents said they were going to take him home and make him a
home-cooked meal.
Isaac Eli Maldonado, 18, and his girlfriend, Jenna Kay Patek, 19, were
killed at about 2 a.m. Jan. 13, 2004, while they were sleeping in a
second-story bedroom of Maldonado's mother's home in the 4900 block of
Curtis Clark Drive. Maldonado and Patek were found on a bed in an upstairs
bedroom with multiple gunshot wounds to their heads.
Maldonado's family said it has hope God will serve justice in the
killings. Two other defendants in the killings, Darrell Lee Swearingen,
26, and Elijah Dupree Huff, 24, face trial later this year on capital
murder charges. They remain in the Nueces County Jail.
Prosecutor James Sales said the case against Vela posed challenges because
there were no eyewitnesses to the killings and no DNA evidence. He relied
on testimony from a fellow jail inmate who said Vela confessed to the
killings. Defense attorneys said the witness lied in an effort to get his
own sentence reduced.
Defense witnesses also offered testimony that provided Vela with an alibi
- that he was playing basketball at the YMCA before the killings and had
gone home and gone to bed.
Defense attorney James Lawrence said talking to Vela's family and
witnesses early on convinced him prosecutors didn't have a case.
"We were on the same train of thought, that he wasn't guilty," Lawrence
said. "The sad thing about all of this is the killer is still out there."
Jurors said the prosecution's case did not convince them that Vela was
guilty and that they expected a stronger case.
"There was a lot of reasonable doubt," juror Ernest Borrego said.
Sales, who argued the killings were gang-related, would not talk
specifically about the verdict because of the two pending cases. He said
it's often difficult to prove cases without highly technical evidence.
"We live in the CSI generation, so people want their crimes on videotape
and they want DNA," he said. "Unfortunately, the criminals don't leave
DNA, and you have to go with what you have. The two best witnesses to the
crime are dead."
(source: Corpus Christi Caller-Times)
******************
Judging Andrea----A justice surprises critics by reversing the Yates
verdict
The reversal of the Andrea Yates murder convictions drew international
media attention, but virtually none of it touched on the controversy over
the hard-line judge who wrote the opinion: former Houston police chief Sam
Nuchia.
The First Court of Appeals justice had been targeted in recent months with
recusal motions from defense attorneys contending that he'd warned his
staff that he'd fire anyone who ever proposed overturning a guilty
verdict. While Nuchia may have been on a handful of 3-judge panels that
did overturn convictions, lawyers couldn't find an earlier instance where
he'd authored any reversals.
Then came the January 6 opinion he wrote in the case of Yates, who had
maintained she was insane when she drowned her 5 children in 2001.
Many defense attorneys wondered if it was his tacit answer to skeptics.
"The timing was very interesting," as one lawyer put it. "Nuchia certainly
picked quite a case for his 'coming-out party.'"
Another appeal before the First Court contended that Nuchia had become one
of the appellate judges over the Yates case only because he'd improperly
swapped a civil case with another judge.
Asked if the earlier heat on Nuchia could have influenced the justice's
decision on Yates, Assistant District Attorney Alan Curry could only say,
" I don't think it probably played any role. But I can't say for sure
because I don't know all the facts."
Curry, who is handling the appeal for the D.A., says his office plans to
push forward with a challenge to the opinion that threw out the
conviction. He'll formally ask this week for a rehearing before all nine
First Court justices. That appeal is likely to reach the state's highest
level, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.
"We think the court has relied upon incorrect law and not addressed all
the facts," Curry says about the reversal. Others, however, say the errors
in the Yates trial presented Nuchia with a golden opportunity to
demonstrate that he could indeed overturn a guilty verdict.
As Nuchia's opinion reflects, his decision came from the false testimony
of the state's flamboyant psychiatrist, Park Dietz of California. Of the
six mental health witnesses offering expert testimony at the trial, Dietz
was the only one to conclude that Yates was sane.
To bolster his findings, Dietz testified about a Law & Order segment (he
was a consultant for the series) about a woman who drowned her children
and was acquitted by reason of insanity. Yates, a fan of the show, could
have gotten the idea to kill her own kids from that episode, the
prosecution reasoned.
Prosecutor Joe Owmby seized on that testimony in his cross-examination of
defense psychiatrist Lucy Puryear and made additional references to it in
closing arguments, saying that Yates's acts had been more diabolic than
demon-possessed. After the conviction, jurors learned that there had been
no such show -- Dietz was mistaken.
Wendell Odom, the defense co-counsel with George Parnham, says he knew
instantly that the false statements -- and the prosecution's use of them
-- fit precisely within the Supreme Court's "4-square" test of reversible
error regarding false testimony.
"As soon as I heard what had happened, I thought if ever there was a case
that falls right in line with that opinion, this had to be it," Odom says.
"It looked like automatic reversal."
The ruling that it could have influenced the jury was countered by the
media attention afforded to juror Leona Baker, who scoffed at any
suggestion Dietz could have swayed the panel's verdict.
However, unnoticed in the publicity was an even stronger stance for
reversal from another juror, Ronald Jones. He called the defense to tell
them he'd written a letter to trial judge Belinda Hill earlier. It stated
flatly that he had been ready to find Yates not guilty by reason of
insanity -- but Dietz's testimony had changed his mind.
That was the first Odom and Parnham had heard about the letter, which was
not in the court file. Jones had typed it on his home computer, so he had
a copy of it, which the defense is now trying to get into the record. "To
one juror, that [false testimony] made a definite difference," Odom says.
David Crump, a law professor at the University of Houston, notes that in
the event of a retrial, Yates would at least be spared from the
possibility of the death penalty, because rulings against double jeopardy
prevent it. That would also mean that another jury would likely be less
prosecution-oriented, because panelists would not have to be agreeable to
the death penalty in order to be eligible to sit on the jury.
Parnham says the defense isn't pushing to have Yates freed (she's
currently at the Skyview Unit, a state psychiatric prison in Rusk). They
merely want her to get adequate treatment. And Parnham has made overtures
about plea negotiations to that effect, to spare her from the "rigors" of
another trial.
With the state's star witness discredited, prosecutors should be more
interested in settling than in seeking to get the conviction upheld, the
defense adds.
If there is no negotiated end to the case, veteran appellate attorney
Terry Gaiser points out, the defense could press the issue of possible
prosecutorial misconduct. The case would be thrown out if that is found,
and pursuing it could at least delay retrial until there is a decision.
The appellate opinion emphasized that no such misconduct was found,
although there was hardly a full hearing into that issue.
Gaiser explains that prosecutors do not necessarily have to be aware of
false testimony for there to be misconduct -- that it could apply if there
was simply a finding that the state showed a reckless disregard for the
truth from one of its witnesses.
Prosecutors have said that soon after Yates drowned her kids, they
received an e-mail that a law-oriented show may have aired an episode on a
woman killing her children. So they asked Dietz about it. He has been
reported as saying he neglected to check on it, and must have been
thinking of his notes about that request when he testified. A grand jury
declined to take criminal action.
Assistant District Attorney Curry says the current appeal doesn't concern
misconduct claims. "But even if new facts are raised, based on everything
I've been hearing, I'm confident there's not going to be any finding of
prosecutorial misconduct."
Crump agrees that such a tactic would be a long shot at best. "I don't
think you have any proof of intent," he says, "and certainly no proof that
the prosecutor was privy to it."
The law professor does find other ironies in the current Texas law
regarding insanity. One is that the more bizarre the crime, the more
likely the defendant will be found not guilty because of insanity. Had
Yates stoned her children to death or cut off their limbs, she may have
stood a better chance at acquittal, he explains.
Another irony is that in the event of a not-guilty verdict, the state has
to do a complete "flip-flop" to keep the defendant in the custody of a
mental institution.
"The district attorney's office has argued at trial, of course, that the
person is not insane, not insane, not insane," Crump explains. "And now
they are virtually compelled to take the position that this person is
crazy, crazy, crazy in order to keep them confined It's the only thing a
prosecutor can do under this law."
(source : Houston Press)
************************
Governor snares capital spotlight
Wait a minute.
I knew a singer and musician might be running for governor of Texas.
I just didn't know it was Rick Perry.
In one of the weirder sidelights in Washington this week, the governor of
Texas played as a guest drummer with ZZ Top on an appropriate song, Sharp
Dressed Man.
Unfortunately, the only time the word sharp is ever associated with Perry
is in connection with either the word looking or dressed.
This was only a warm-up to today's big event, the Last Great George W.
Bush Presidential Inaugural Presented by Roger Williams AutoMall. Or sort
of. Williams, a Weatherford car dealer, is co-chairman of the inauguration
finance committee.
Apparently, Perry came to Washington claiming that since he's been filling
in as Bush's sub for 4 years now, he'd be a good fill-in on drums for ZZ
Top's Frank Beard.
Perry has drummed with ZZ Top before. But what worries me is the lack of
an explanation for Beard's apparent disappearance. I'm worried that he got
shoved out of the spotlight, just like Comptroller Carole Keeton
Strayhorn.
Also, I'm concerned that Perry reportedly sang a duet with country star
Clay Walker at a $500,000 party financed by the state trucking lobby,
which likes the governor's idea of building toll roads across Texas as
wide as Wal-Mart parking lots.
According to The Associated Press, Perry tampered with the lyrics to the
Lynyrd Skynyrd song Sweet Home Alabama. He sang, "In Houston, they love
the governor."
Depends, according to polls.
The last time I looked, Perry would lose the 2006 Republican gubernatorial
primary to U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison if she decides to come home to
Texas.
The poll was 60 % to 32 %, meaning that Perry would take a drumming in
Houston and everywhere else in Texas, except perhaps in the immediate
vicinity of Roger Williams AutoMall.
For the record, the same poll showed Perry with a 56-30 lead over more
likely opponent "One Tough Grandma" Strayhorn.
For a third-party opinion on the sudden emergence of a singing governor, I
turned to a man who knows something about both singing and third parties.
Novelist, real singer and Texas Monthly columnist Kinky Friedman is a good
friend of George W. and Laura Bush but not of Perry. On Feb. 3, Friedman
will stand alongside the Alamo and announce his campaign as an independent
candidate for governor.
"Apparently, the governor is taking up music," Friedman said by phone from
his ranch in the Hill Country near Medina. "Gov. Perry must be taking some
time off from building golf courses to perform with ZZ Top.
"Meanwhile, here we are. Texas is the 2nd wealthiest state in America, but
25 % of our children live below the poverty line. We're what, 48th or 49th
in funding for education?"
Actually, we're about 35th to 38th in most rankings. But he has the idea.
We're next-to-worst among larger states.
"The only ranking where Texas is No. 1," he said, "is executions."
Friedman's serious side only comes out when he's criticizing Perry.
In his magazine column, Friedman has supported capital punishment, just
not killing the wrong guy. He often writes about convicts who were
sentenced to death despite doubts.
He declined the invitation to Bush's inaugural.
"But I don't think they really meant it," he said. "It only came in the
mail yesterday."
He compared his campaign to Arnold Schwarzenegger's.
And Friedman made it no secret which Republican opponent he fears most.
"Kay Bailey Hutchison," he said.
"She's twice the man Rick Perry is."
The governor can provide his own rimshot.
(source: Fort Worth Star-Telegram)
********************
District judge to hear lawsuit against DA
Judge Robert Hill Trapp of the 411th District Court will oversee the
removal lawsuit filed against District Attorney John C. Fisher, county
officials said.
Trapp is based in San Jacinto County.
San Augustine District Clerk Jeannie Steptoe said she received the order
of assignment Jan. 13, signed by presiding Judge Olen Underwood of the
Second Administrative Judicial Region.
In December, 44 residents from San Augustine and Sabine counties filed a
suit calling for Fisher's removal.
The petition, citing 10 specific counts, states Fisher should be removed
on the grounds he is "incompetent, or has engaged in incompetence or
official misconduct."
Among the allegations in the 24-page lawsuit are that Fisher paid jail
inmates to wash his private vehicle and they, in turn, bought drugs; that
he illegally freed an inmate from the Sabine County Jail; and that he
failed to file an annual budget or financial statement with either of the
commissioners courts in his jurisdiction during his tenure.
Fisher has been the district attorney since January 2001 for the First
Judicial District of Texas, which covers both Sabine and San Augustine
counties. He was re-elected during the 2004 March primary.
(source: Beaumont Enterprise)
********************
Death-truck defendant wants to withdraw guilty plea
One of the alleged ringleaders of a human smuggling gang blamed for the
deaths of 19 immigrants asked a federal judge today for permission to
withdraw a guilty plea made 8 months ago.
Attorneys for Karla Patricia Chavez Joya accused prosecutors of misconduct
for failing to tell attorneys for other defendants that Chavez's
statements contradicted statements by one of the prosecution's most
important witnesses.
Defense attorneys John LaGrappe and Jeffery Sasser also were critical of
the conduct of the lead prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel
Rodriguez, saying that he shouted and used abusive language while
questioning Chavez.
"We have filed a motion to withdraw based on prosecutorial misconduct, and
we have alleged that the government is an unindicted co-conspirator,"
LaGrappe said.
He declined further comment because of a gag order imposed by U.S.
District Judge Vanessa Gilmore.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Nancy Herrera said, "This office has been served
with a copy of that motion, and we will file a response with the court in
due course."
Gilmore scheduled a hearing on the motion for Monday.
The accusation that the government is an unindicted co-conspirator is
based on allegations purportedly made by a customs agent, whom the
attorneys have been unable to identify, alleging that customs agents
accepted bribes to allow vehicles carrying illegal immigrants to pass
through the checkpoint at Sarita, about 50 miles north of Harlingen.
The defense's motion says the allegations are based on second-hand
information from a TV reporter and a Harris County constable.
The attorneys allege that Chavez's statements contradicted statements by
Abelardo Flores, one of the key prosecution witnesses in a trial that
ended in the conviction of two members of Chavez's smuggling organization
in December. Gilmore acquitted a third defendant during the trial.
The motion to withdraw the plea agreement comes a day after Gilmore
delayed the death-penalty trial of Tyrone Williams, accused of continuing
to drive while immigrants were dying of heat exposure and lack of air in
the trailer he was towing.
Jury selection in the trial was scheduled to begin Friday, but Gilmore
delayed the trial to give Williams' attorney time to seek a rehearing by
the full 18-member 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on a decision last
week by a 3-judge panel that struck down orders by Gilmore that were
favorable to the defense.
Victoria County sheriff's deputies discovered 17 bodies in Williams'
abandoned trailer May 14, 2003, at an abandoned truck stop near Victoria.
2 other immigrants died in a hospital.
Chavez and Williams were among 14 people indicted in connection with the
failed smuggling attempt. Of the remaining 12, 4 have pleaded guilty, four
are in Mexico City awaiting trial on smuggling charges and one is awaiting
trial in Houston.
(source: Houston Chronicle)
