Free Republic

Capital murder defendant Eddie Ray Routh appeared to be faking insanity after his arrest and may have formed wild stories about “pig assassins” by watching reruns in his jail cell of Seinfeld and the Boss Hog reality show, a mental health expert testified Friday. Dr. Randall Price, a forensic psychologist who frequently testifies as an expert witness, said Routh was overheard talking about the two shows in phone calls he made from the Erath County Jail. “For a lot of time he’s talked about pigs with a lot of people,” he said. “It’s suspicious.” An old episode of Seinfeld featured...

A man was found incompetent to stand trial Thursday in the fatal shooting of a West Virginia sheriff who later was implicated by federal prosecutors in a separate corruption scandal. Cabell County Circuit Judge Paul Farrell ordered Tennis Melvin Maynard of Delbarton committed to a state mental health facility for life. Mingo County Sheriff Eugene Crum was killed in April 2013 in downtown Williamson. […] Maynard and Crum had known each other for years, with Crum previously serving as a boxing club mentor to Maynard when he was a teenager and when Crum was police chief in the town of...

For the first time, lawyers for accused theater shooter James Holmes say he killed 12 people and wounded dozens more at an Aurora movie theater last summer. But Holmes' lawyers say he was "in the throes of a psychotic episode" at the time. The admission came in a motion filed Tuesday but made public Wednesday. His lawyers were trying to argue that Holmes should be unrestrained during his upcoming trial.

The long journey toward a verdict in the deadly Colorado theater shootings enters a new and critical phase Monday when suspect James Holmes asks a judge to change his plea to not guilty by reason of insanity. The plea is widely seen as Holmes' best hope, and perhaps his only hope, of avoiding the death penalty. But his lawyers have held off until now, fearing a wrinkle in the law could cripple their ability to raise his mental health as a mitigating factor during the sentencing phase. Two judges have refused to rule on the constitutionality of the law, saying...

A New Hampshire jury today rejected an insanity defense and convicted a former Eagle Scout of killing a mother and maiming her young daughter during a machete and knife attack. The jury of five women and seven men deliberated for 90 minutes yesterday and a short time this morning before returning the guilty verdicts against Christopher Gribble, 21. Gribble had claimed he was insane when he and three friends killed Kimberly Cates, 42, and severely wounded her daughter, Jaimie, then 11, during a October 2009 Mont Vernon, N.H. home invasion. Gribble now faces life in prison without the possibility of...

We now know that Jared Lee Loughner, mass murderer and would-be assassin of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, was not a Tea Party member, a Rush Limbaugh dittohead, a Sarah Palin campaign worker or a subscriber to Glenn Beck’s Fusion magazine.   And we all agree that he is crazy: Except me.   He isn’t crazy, he is depraved[1]:  morally bad or debased; corrupt; perverted. As I have suggested on earlier occasions, our culture has a tendency to expect that anybody who commits multiple murders must be an insane man, a lunatic, someone who “snapped”, or a person who is mentally unstable.  This is...

There is a myth about our country circulating mainly in conservative circles that we are a good, solid, can-do type of nation. We see a problem, and by-gum, we fix it. Well, our crime problem has been spiraling out of control for years, and by-gum, we haven’t done a thing to fix it. Judge Cornelius starts his excellent book by citing the terrible crime statistics that show the United States to be the most violent, crime-ridden nation in the world. And we are, so the good Judge says, because American justice is neither swift nor sure. If justice were swift...

College Park, Md. (CNSNews.com) - Former Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) said her bid for the White House as a Green Party candidate won't hurt Sen. Barack Obama or Sen. Hillary Clinton's chances for being the first African-American or woman U.S. president, respectively, because U.S. elections have been corrupted. "Basically, what you are suggesting is by participating in the Democratic process the Green Party is going to become, quote, 'the spoiler,' " McKinney told Cybercast News Service at a rally Tuesday at the University of Maryland. "It is impossible to become a spoiler based on past experience when one examines the...

...By testifying in trials as expert witnesses, mental health professionals help us reclassify complicated moral and legal questions as seemingly clear-cut scientific matters. An endless stream of news stories about the latest advances in brain scans and the chemical conquest of personality enhances the experts’ credibility and feeds into a belief that we have come to a sophisticated understanding of the intersection between mind, brain, and behavior. But a close look at Andrea Yates’ legal saga, along with a less-famous Supreme Court decision about the insanity defense that was handed down shortly before she was acquitted, casts doubt on the...

WASHINGTON (AP) - John W. Hinckley Jr., who was committed to a mental hospital after trying to assassinate President Reagan, is asking a federal judge to let him spend more time with his family. Prosecutors oppose the request, saying they need to review Hinckley's medical records. Last year, a federal judge approved Hinckley's request to leave St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington for seven extended visits with his parents in Virginia. Hinckley is down to his last visit. On Aug. 1 he asked a federal judge to extend that order. "On each of these trips, Mr. Hinckley has complied fully with...

FRANKFURT AN DER ODER, GERMANY - In a bizarre case that has shocked Germany, police said Tuesday that a woman gave birth to nine babies over a period of 16 years - and is suspected of killing each of them immediately after childbirth. The 39-year-old woman confessed to having delivered the infants herself, the public prosecutor's office said at a news conference. Investigators said the woman, who also has four other children, gave conflicting accounts as to just how many children she has given birth to between 1988 and 2004. Fearing the toll might actually be higher, investigators with sniffer...

Insane must payNorway's Supreme Court has ruled that even those judged as insane when committing a crime must be held financially accountable for their acts, reversing common legal practice.Up until now insanity has acted as a protection against compensation claims for non-economic damages to victims of violence or their survivors, newspaper VG reports.On Tuesday the Supreme Court overturned an appeals court decision and ordered a 36-year-old to pay NOK 50,000 (USD 7,600) in compensation despite being assessed as insane at the time of the crime."A dramatic change. The Supreme Court is now saying that consideration of the victim is more...

<p>Buh Bye former great Freerepublic, home of wannabe conservativ idiots, GESTAPO-like Mods and NAZIs. This once great forum has been trashed over the past three years like never before and I’m GLAD that these fucking MOD’s banned me today. If we loose this Election, then FR will be a part in this disaster. No freedom of speech, no real conservatives anymore, it’s a catastophical failure like our President said correctly, hehe… Just like fucking Germany back in 1933, Brownshirts all over the place. I’m puking, little boys.</p>

FORT WORTH - A neuropsychologist testified Wednesday that Alphonso Nickerson suffers from a rare form of epilepsy and was having a seizure -- an electrical storm in his brain -- when he sexually assaulted a 64-year-old retired nurse who suffocated under the weight of his body. Defense expert Clifford Hopewell based his opinion, in part, on a videotape that he viewed of a naked Nickerson masturbating and rambling obscenities for hours inside the Tarrant County Jail on Jan. 8, 1999 -- nearly two years after his arrest in the death of Maxine Nash. Hopewell testified that he believes that Nickerson...

John W. Hinckley Jr., who in 1982 was acquitted by reason of insanity in his attempt to assassinate President Ronald Reagan, has been granted court permission to have unsupervised visits with his parents. Hinckley has been held in St. Elizabeth’s Mental Hospital in Washington, D.C., for more than 20 years. He’d been previously granted only supervised visits. The court’s decision has angered many people, including the former first lady, Nancy Reagan, and James Brady, who was severely wounded in Hinckley’s attack. (Two others were also injured.) Former Reagan aides, such as Patrick Buchanan, have expressed outrage. Ad hoc outrage, however,...

Over a year ago, when snipers were terrorizing Washington, D.C., the conventional wisdom was that the perpetrator was a white, right-wing Christian extremist, probably with a military background. It was a position arrived at more by the centripetal forces of political correctness rather than the pretended scientific application of profiling, since for some reason these are the only kind of extremists one can denounce with impunity. As Michelle Malkin recently pointed out, when the truth became known, that the snipers were not redneck anti-government types but self-proclaimed jihadist warriors, some pundits were forced to dine on crow, but not those...

Nation: Insanity defense to be employed in Massachusetts office shootings trialBy DENISE LAVOIE, Associated PressCAMBRIDGE, Mass. (March 31, 2002 5:44 p.m. EST) - When police responded to a shooting at the offices of Edgewater Technology on Dec. 26, 2000, they found Michael "Mucko" McDermott sitting motionless in a chair, an AK 47-style semiautomatic rifle beside one foot, a 12-guage shotgun beside the other. The only thing he said when officers arrested him was "I don't speak German." McDermott, 43, goes on trial Monday in the killings of seven of his co-workers, with his lawyer planning to argue that he was...