Developing a viable defense to serious charges is a criminal defense lawyer’s stock in trade. Charges don’t get any more serious than murder, calling for the hardest, deepest, most serious effort possible. Kentucky criminal defense lawyer Shannon Sexton must have been up all night pondering his defense of Woody Will Smith.
From Salon :
A Kentucky man accused of strangling his wife is poised to claim excessive caffeine from sodas, energy drinks and diet pills left him so mentally unstable he couldn’t have knowingly killed her, his lawyer has notified a court.
Woody Will Smith, 33, is scheduled for trial starting Monday on a murder charge in the May 2009 death of Amanda Hornsby-Smith, 28.
Defense attorney Shannon Sexton filed notice with the Newport court of plans to argue his client ingested so much caffeine in the days leading up to the killing that it rendered him temporarily insane — unable even to form the intent of committing a crime.
Sound a bit, well, ridiculous? Well, consider what the DSM-IV has to say about caffeine overdose:
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — published by the American Psychiatric Association showing standard criteria for the classification of mental disorders — defines overdose as more than 300 mg. That’s about three cups of coffee.
That applies, however, to caffeine induced insomnia, as opposed to “temporary insanity” as claimed here. At Psychology Today, however, the number of cups of coffee came up slightly higher.
In humans, lethal toxicity is estimated at between 150 and 200 mg/kg, meaning that an average adult would have to consume between 80 and 100 cups of coffee in a very short period of time to induce extreme badness.
Murder would seem to fit within the definition of “extreme badness,” though it’s not entirely clear whether extreme badness is an accepted description by the DSM-IV.
The defense has an expert. psychologist Robert Noelker, prepared to testify that Smith, who claims not to remember killing his wife, was unable to form the requisite intent to commit the crime of murder.
Noelker said he determined Smith was open to “brief psychosis” brought on by sleep deprivation, which was caused by the heavy ingestion of diet pills and caffeine in the weeks leading up to his wife’s death.
“It is my opinion that this disorder was the direct result of psychosis due to severe insomnia,” Noelker wrote in a report filed in Smith’s case. Noelker is expected to be called as a defense witness.
The prosecution contends that its testing failed to show that Smith had any “amphetamine-type substances” in his system shortly after his arrest.
The defense is an easy one to ridicule, considering that we’re a nation of sleep-deprived, caffeine swillers, who nonetheless manage to navigate our days without killing our wives (or husbands, as the case may be). Perhaps Dr. Noelker is simply another guy with letters after his name willing to say anything for a buck. Like the failed Twinkie Defense, this may go down in the annals of criminal law as another improbable attempt to find any excuse to get a killer off.
On the other hand, in a somewhat analogous situation, it worked for Daniel Noble in a vehicular assault case in Idaho.
Medical tests in the Noble case resulted in a diagnosis of a rare form of bipolar disorder — triggered by heavy consumption of caffeine, Moorer said.
That evidence went before a judge, who dismissed the charges after concluding Noble was unable to form the mental intent to commit a crime.
Whether or not the defense is viable in Smith’s trial will soon be seen, and the odds aren’t good. That said, you can’t fault Shannon Sexton for coming up with an imaginative, and not entirely impossible, defense. And sometimes the bizarre and implausible may in fact be true.
Update: It appears that Sexton had a change of heart (I might have said “change of mind,” but that doesn’t seem appropriate in this case).
A lawyer for Woody Will Smith said his client made false confessions because he suffered a sleep-deprived psychosis. There was no mention during the first day of trial in Campbell Circuit Court that Smith was allegedly taking massive amounts of caffeine-laced pills and the energy drink No Fear to stay awake.
He also informed the jury that the reason for Smith’s sleeplessness was that he was up all night worrying that his wife was having an affair and was about to leave him. This might not be the best thing to concede, by the way, in a trial for murdering a wife.
H/T Kevin Underhill, who, I suspect, is a bit less sanguine about the merits of this defense.
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Interesting, although I would’ve expected to see a coffee deprivation defense before a coffee overdose defense. Your honor, my client hadn’t had his coffee yet.
Yet another imaginative use of java. Perhaps somebody will see your comment and the coffee deprivation defense will debut tomorrow in a courtroom near you.
A caffeine-related defense to violent crime? If this works, it is SO a win for me. Fear me, world. Fear me now.
From the description of the Noble case, it sounded to me like that was not so much a “caffeine defense” per se as a defense of bipolar disorder with insomnia + caffeine among the triggering factors. Assuming that diagnosis was legit, and the judge certainly thought so, that one makes sense to me.
If I recall correctly, the “Twinkie Defense” involved a similar argument — it wasn’t alleged to be pure Twinkie rage. (Full disclosure: I represent Hostess. In a Twinkie case, no less.)
Also, Noble would not seem to have had any motive to run down some strangers, so how to explain that otherwise? But I didn’t see a reference to any other mental condition in Smith’s case, there was a possible motive in the fact that she may have been planning to leave him, and I am not sure that a “brief psychosis” would last long enough to tie somebody up. So — while I do not at all fault Smith’s attorney for doing his or her best — based on my limited knowledge of the facts in this case, I’m skeptical.
But no one knows better than I do that the bizarre and implausible often do turn out to be true.
I read Noble the same way, so it’s applicability was, say, limited. But who am I to question a lawyer’s fertile imagination?
There would be a lot of that going around, brother.