Posted on 02/15/2005 9:22:35 AM PST by kcvl
GUILTY!
In no way did it ever make me feel enraged enough to kill, as the young man claimed in this case.
Yes, it was his grandparents; I was mistaken.
Kill the GP, take their money, take their guns, take their truck, burn the house to the ground, and run.
Yeah, it was the drugs!
If I were the kid I would sue to get my money back from his lawyers. What a lame defense. I could have come up with something better than that. Like a cult of satanic worshipers in the Bay area were responsible. Errr,,,,, has that been used yet??
CHARLESTON, S.C., Feb. 10, 2005(AP) Defense lawyers who say their teenage client killed his grandparents because his mind was clouded by the antidepressant Zoloft rested their case Thursday without calling the youth to testify.
Prosecutors in the case of Christopher Pittman, 15, were expected to call reply witnesses later in the day, and the murder case was likely to go to the jury Friday.
Pittman was 12 when he shot Joe Pittman, 66, and Joy Pittman, 62, to death with a pump-action shotgun as they slept in their rural Chester County home in November 2001.
Prosecutors say was angry at his grandparents for disciplining him. For its final witness Thursday, the defense presented testimony from a psychiatrist and former Food and Drug Administration official that the antidepressant kept Pittman from knowing right from wrong.
"The whole sequence of actions was rash and frantic and done at a high level of anger - anger that was chemically induced," said Richard Kapit, who at the FDA once handled applications and safety reviews of antidepressants like Zoloft.
Pittman suffered from a substance-induced mood disorder with psychotic features, Kapit testified.
The defendant was "very rash, very excited and very angry," Kapit said, adding his actions were "very much a part of manic behavior."
Pittman, who is being tried as an adult, faces 30 years to life in prison if convicted.
A month before the slayings, Christopher was hospitalized in Florida, where his father lives, when he threatened to kill himself. The boy was prescribed the anti-depressant Paxil. Shortly after he moved in with his grandparents in early November 20001, another doctor put him on Zoloft.
Prosecutors say Pittman killed the couple, then burned their house and drove about 20 miles in their car before getting bogged down on a road. He initially told police a black man killed his grandparents and kidnapped him.
In a statement to police, Pittman said his grandparents deserved to die because they paddled him. Killing someone simply because they punished you, Kapit said, is just another sign Pittman was manic.
The trial was moved to Charleston County because of pretrial publicity in Chester.
I'm watching Fox News.
Christopher Pittman, 15, is charged as an adult with two counts of murder of his grandparents... his mind was clouded by the anti-depressant Zoloft he claimed.
Son of Zues...
Maybe they did buy it, they just didn't feel it was enough to exonerate him...
I agree, he should get life!
Yep! That pedophile Father Paul Shanley is going away here in Massachusetts,now this good news.
The system worked.
I don't know... throw in some cute puppies, and that might be enough to make me an enraged monster...
;0)
Not long ago, there was an article in Reader's Digest about one of those new pills for adult with attention deficit.
The guy who tried them said he decided to take it for ten days to see what it was like.
He said the first day he did more work than he had done in two months. Never had a better day; never felt better, overachiever kind of stuff.
Same with the second day.
The third day he woke up worrying about only having seven more days on the pill.
He stopped that day.
FINALLY! A sane jury, thank you jurors!
We should forget why his Grandparents put him on the stuff to begin with. Violence toward little helpless animals came before he killed the two people who loved and cared for him.
sw
Good one!
lol. Yeah right.
That and Twinkies.
GOOD
Murdered his grandparents.
Hope he gets put away for life.
Good. Warm up Ol' Sparky.
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