The electric chair joke's about to become about as original as the JUULLAAAAYYY ones, which sucks cos it's hilarious.
I see "Chris will get away because insanity" popping up a lot, but if I recall that shit is rare and exceedingly hard to pull off and I'm not at all convinced it'll work for Chris. He bought a book on how to fuck the elderly/disabled, made careful (albeit shitty, I admit) attempts to conceal it (he knew it was wrong), and kept it hidden for an indefinite period of time, and committed it repeatedly.
Sorry to ping you,
@Alexander Hamilton cos I feel like you've probably discussed this at length in the other threads, but can you weigh in a little on this?
I'm always happy to discuss this stuff, and you're basically correct.
Not guilty by reason of infinity is a really really hard thing to pull off. Like so many things, this is pretty State specific. This article has a good explanation of it for Virginia:
The key takeaway is:
“The defendant must first have a serious psychiatric illness,” Daniel Murrie, head of the Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, explained via email. “And because of that illness, must have: Been unable to understand the nature, character, or consequences of his act; been unable to understand and appreciate the wrongfulness of his act; been unable to resist the impulse to commit the act.”
Simply put, defense attorneys would have to prove Bernard didn't realize the crime he is accused of committing was wrong and that he couldn’t stop himself from committing it."
As the article notes, only 1% of defendants nationwide try this in an average year and only a quarter of that 1% succeed.
And in many cases NGRI is way worse than just taking your lumps because you go away indefinitely.
Virginia recently overhauled their mental health laws a little - the big one relevant here is stuff like autism, if it can be shown to have a direct and substantial relationship to the crime, can create the possibility for deferred probation in cases where it otherwise would not be an option per statute.
I feel like Chris' attorney will definitely be pushing it as a factor in plea-bargain negotiations, but even in the incredibly unlikely event this goes to trial I don't see them putting on an NGRI defense and I definitely don't see one succeeding - in part because of factors you identified.
www.reuters.com
Not Chris already being disruptive. There's no way that prison psych isn't going to load his ass up with the heavy stuff. I wondered what he'd be like once they pump an autist full of psychiatric drugs for the express purpose of shutting him up but then I remembered we've got a golden playbook on how it's going to turn out over in the Susan Schofield thread.