Posted on 12/18/2007 1:06:45 PM PST by neverdem
Associated Press
Attorneys have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case of a teen sentenced to 30 years in prison for killing his grandparents when he was 12, arguing that the sentence is cruel.
Christopher Pittman shoot his grandparents Joe and Joy Pittman with a shotgun in 2001, then set fire to their home. During his trial four years later, Pittman's attorneys unsuccessfully argued the slayings were influenced by the antidepressant Zoloft - a charge the maker of the drug vigorously denied.
In the brief submitted to the high court late Monday, attorneys from the University of Texas School of Law argued that the 30-year sentence violates Christopher Pittman's Eighth Amendment protection from cruel and unusual punishment.
Such a lengthy sentence is "unconstitutionally disproportionate as applied to a 12-year-old child," according a copy of the petition provided by the Juvenile Justice Foundation. It said Pittman "is the nation's only inmate serving such a harsh sentence for an offense committed at such a young age."
Twenty-five states and the District of Columbia set the minimum age at which a juvenile may be tried as an adult above 12, so in more than half the nation, Pittman's attorneys argue, Pittman could not have been tried as adult and could never have been sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Each year about 200,000 defendants under 18 are sent to the adult system, according to the National Center for Juvenile Justice. Most end up there because of state laws that automatically define them as adults, due to their age or offense. Those numbers escalated in the 1990s as juvenile crime soared and legislators responded, with 48 states making it easier to transfer kids into criminal court, according to the center.
Zoloft is the most widely prescribed antidepressant in the United States, with 32.7 million prescriptions written in 2003. In 2004, the Food and Drug Administration ordered Zoloft and other antidepressants to carry "black box" warnings - the government's strongest warning short of a ban - about an increased risk of suicidal behavior in children.
Those risks, Healy perceived, included horrific withdrawal symptoms, such as dizziness, anxiety, nightmares, nausea, and constant agitation, that were frightening some users out of ever terminating their regimen—an especially bitter outcome in view of the manufacturers' promise of enhancing self-sufficiency and peace of mind. The key proclaimed advantage of the new serotonin drugs over the early tranquilizers, freedom from dependency, was simply false. Moreover, the companies had to have known they were gambling wildly with public health. As early as 1984, Healy reports, Eli Lilly had in hand the conclusion pronounced by Germany's ministry of health in denying a license to fluoxetine (later Prozac): "Considering the benefit and the risk, we think this preparation totally unsuitable for the treatment of depression."
As for the frequently rocky initial weeks of treatment, a troubling record not just of "suicidality" but of actual suicides and homicides was accumulating in the early 1990s. The drug firms, Healy saw, were distancing themselves from such tragedies by blaming depression itself for major side effects. Handouts for doctors and patients urged them to persist in the face of early emotional turmoil that only proved, they were told, how vigorously the medicine was tackling the ailment. So, too, dependency symptoms during termination were said to be evidence that the long-stifled depression was now reemerging.
The most gripping portions of Let Them Eat Prozac narrate courtroom battles in which Big Pharma's lawyers, parrying negligence suits by the bereaved, took this line of doubletalk to its limit by explaining SSRI-induced stabbings, shootings, and self-hangings by formerly peaceable individuals as manifestations of not-yet-subdued depression. As an expert witness for plaintiffs against SSRI makers in cases involving violent behavior, Healy emphasized that depressives don't commit mayhem. But he also saw that his position would be strengthened if he could cite the results of a drug experiment on undepressed, certifiably normal volunteers. If some of them, too, showed grave disturbance after taking Pfizer's Zoloft—and they did in Healy's test, with long-term consequences that have left him remorseful as well as indignant—then depression was definitively ruled out as the culprit.
Healy suspected that SSRI makers had squirreled away their own awkward findings about drug-provoked derangement in healthy subjects, and he found such evidence after gaining access to Pfizer's clinical trial data on Zoloft. In 2001, however, just when he had begun alerting academic audiences to his forthcoming inquiry, he was abruptly denied a professorship he had already accepted in a distinguished University of Toronto research institute supported by grants from Pfizer. The company hadn't directly intervened; the academics themselves had decided that there was no place on the team for a Zoloft skeptic.
This kid just had a state mandated increased dose of the drug before he killed his grandparents. If you think I'm a bleeding heart, then look up serotonin syndrome, serotonin withrawal syndrome or serotonin discontinuation syndrome. The "chemical imbalance" explanation for depression was just a bill of goods, IMHO.
I am surprised there are more of these cases. Our society drugs way too many kids.
Printer friendly webpage, 2nd paragraph:
Well, well. Finally the truth is seeping out.
I don’t look for this to gain mainstream traction, as the amount of money against the truth is just staggering.
Look for the “you must be a scientologist” crowd to be along shortly. They always show up on any threads that don’t promote drugs-for-mental-health.
Since this charge has been laid on anti-depressives, parents all over the country have stopped giving their kids those drugs or prevented them from being prescribed at all — and the number of suicides in that age group have gone up. What is the solution, then?
The mall killer in Omaha was on anti-depressant drugs — which he did not take. He was also on various kinds of illegal drugs. How many of the people who commit suicide are also on other drugs, legal or otherwise?
Is that you Tom Cruise???
If he can murder two people in cold blood at the age of twelve I don’t want him to ever get out. But that’s just me.
Lazy parents are to blame IMHO. The "NEVER work at something a DRUG can do for you", crowd that makes up most of the Boomer and XGen parents!
Drugs way to many people to with these designer lift up drugs. There are so many dangers with them.
Marking
there’s a difference between killing and murdering.
Although there was a denial in the media that the omaha shooter was on SSRIs, you cannot mass a mass killing of strangers in America in the last 30 years in which the killer wasn’t on these drugs.
This subject is in dispute but the science is far more solid than anything having to do with global warming. Even the Bush FDA (not exactly an industry unfriendly group) put a warning label on SSRIs for kids because they cause....wait for it.....wait for it.....suicidal and homicidal ideation. For laypeople, ideation means that you have thoughts of something which were not previously occurring.
At what point are these chemical shotguns going to get banned, at least for children? (Its a shotgun because it has no way of knowing where it goes and covers all receptors whether they are unhealthy or not.)
I hope the truth gets out, but maybe the only way for this kid to catch a break is if the bleeding hearts and Kennedy thinks it is cruel and unusual punishment.
IMHO, he killed while he was obeying a state mandated psychosis. IIRC, he's been normal since he has been off the drugs in jail.
Bingo.
Its way easier to just pop a pill than to have to spend the hours trying to work with your kid to get them the necessary exercise, nutrition and mental activity necessary to prevent (insert your mental illness here).
If I told my mother that I was depressed, she would tell me to go outside until I stopped feeling depressed. Somehow the sunshine, fresh air and my dogs managed to keep my from killing myself.
ping
Close follow up when these drugs, SSRIs, are started, or the dose is increased. Maybe testing.
The state doen't mandate getting drunk. This was a state mandated psychosis when he killed, IMHO.
Let’s properly distinguish between SSRI’s for children, on the one hand, and SSRI’s for adults, on the other.
I have personal experience with the almost miraculous benefits of SSRI’s for adults who are severely depressed. Now, if you want to argue that the benefits do not justify the risk of side effects ... tell that to someone who has been saved from emotional misery, and possibly suicide, by these drugs.
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