The "American Sniper" trial

SP96445

I'm wondering what peoples opinions are regarding the trial of Eddie Ray Routh for the murder of Chris Kyle. Especially opinions from those from Texas and veterans or those with servicemen/veterans in their family.
My take on it is it is playing out like a modern Greek Tragedy. An American hero is assassinated by another veteran who, by all accounts, brought back from the war a disease (PTSD) affecting many soldiers returning from war.
It shines a light on the failure of our institutions (VA) and societal reluctance to deal with this epidemic.
The case for insanity for Routh is certainly compelling and in many states would probably would bring about a not guilty by insanity verdict.
Texas however is a pretty tough state for "law and order" and it may be a small miracle for an insanity verdict.
IF the verdict does come back not guilty by reasons of insanity in a conservative state like TX will this signal an acceptance of PTSD as a "real disease" that the USA must confront?

Last-12-Exit

I know PTSD is a real disorder but is it an excuse to murder? Or at least an excuse for an insanity plea? The tragedy here is that a man that was helping other veterans cope with after war life was murdered by the person he was trying to help. Regardless of your feelings of the movie, he was doing good work from all accounts.

I've never liked the insanity plea. This guy should serve hard time in prison if found guilty. PTSD or not, he murdered someone.

SP96445

There is no way he will ever be a free man.
the 3 choices are probably: death row/executed, life in prison, life in a mental hospital prison.

SP96445

Jury took about 10 minutes to convict him of murder. No judicial acknowledgment of mental illness. Seems like a missed opportunity to me

Amongst the Ani

It should have at least been acknowledged. We have an epidemic going on with PTSD. We have way too many people coming home that were not violent people who never showed any signs of being capable of domestic violence killing their spouses in a fit of rage brought on by PTSD. We would be wise to try and actually deal with this issue before we get into another war. We will probably be fighting people again who have no issues beheading people and lighting people on fire alive. The things our service members see and have to deal with no one should ever have to see. Kids having bomb vests strapped on to themselves and being sent at check points to blow them up, leaving someone to have to decide to have to kill a kid or die themselves. I thank god now as an almost 40 year old with 4 kids that when I served in the Marines we were in peace time. I know I could have killed in that situation but also know it would jack me up for the rest of my life.

Who Princess

To the OP and others who've posted, I'm a Texan and live about an hour and a half from the town where the trial was held. The trial received lots of local news coverage and I heard many people discussing it.

Believe it or not, not everybody in Texas supports the death penalty. Also, many people here were concerned about Routh getting a fair trial when the movie American Sniper is currently in theaters and so popular.

I don't know why the prosecutors didn't seek the death penalty, considering the notoriety of the case, but a conviction of capital murder requires an automatic sentence of life without parole when the death penalty has been waived. Usually it's waived at the request of the victim's family or when the case has a possibility of being overturned on appeal. I'm no lawyer and I haven't heard anything about the Littlefield or Kyle families making such a request, so your guess is as good as mine.

The mental health experts that examined Routh from the defense and prosecution disagreed on his actual diagnosis. But both sets of experts agreed that he did NOT have PTSD. I was very surprised to learn that although he had been deployed to Iraq, he did not see combat. He was also deployed to Haiti after the earthquake there, but he wasn't involved in any kind of direct assistance like search and rescue. I believe that there is something deeply wrong with this man but I have no idea what it is.

The big question everyone seems to have is why did this happen? Many people have also been very critical of Routh's mother, who approached Chris Kyle about helping her son with PTSD. I won't go that far; she just wanted to help her son and didn't have the knowledge or resources to find what he really needed. I can certainly fault the VA hospital that treated Routh and released him without appropriately assessing him. Kyle and Littlefield were in way over their heads.

Despite popular belief, the insanity defense is rarely used, something like 1% of criminal cases. After this trial, I don't think we're any closer to knowing if PTSD can fall under the insanity defense.

HughFreakingDillon

so no motive for the killing is known?

SP96445

Thank you who princess for that perspective. The facts about no combat in the Middle East and Hatti issues where rarely reported in mass media. Would love to hear more from fellow Texans and vets

Who Princess

Editorial from the Dallas Morning News:

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/columnists/jacquielynn-floyd/20150225-floyd-what-do-we-do-with-defendants-when-nuts-isnt-insane.ece

Chris Kyle was accurate if inelegant in diagnosing his own killer’s disorder: “This dude is straight-up nuts.”

He was right. A few hours after Kyle, of American Sniper fame, quietly texted that message to his friend Chad Littlefield, Eddie Ray Routh murdered both men.

But Routh is not, by the strict legal standard imposed by Texas and by many other states, insane. Despite critics who argue that jurors were blinded by Kyle’s military celebrity or by Texas’ “gun culture,” the jury was scrupulous in applying the standard that the law requires when they found Routh guilty of capital murder late Tuesday.

Routh was straight-up nuts, but he wasn’t insane. That apparent contradiction underscores the difficulty of applying the unshaded binary standards of justice to the complex ambiguities of mental illness.

The evidence in this universally covered trial indicated that Routh was mentally disturbed. It also indicated that he knew shooting Kyle and Littlefield would kill them, and he knew that in the eyes of the world, doing so was morally wrong.

By some accounts, Routh killed the pair because he could sense that they just didn’t like him: “I shot them because they wouldn’t talk to me,” he told a jail official several months later. “I feel bad about it, but they wouldn’t talk to me.”

Of course, that’s an oversimplified motive for capital murder, but there have been a lot of oversimplifications about this case. Too many opinions about it have been based on political and emotional sentiments about military service, post-traumatic stress disorder, a blockbuster movie and the difficult transition for many soldiers from active duty to civilian life.

Trials, by necessity, often reduce complicated events to simple, competing storylines. Routh’s was reduced to either a: He was a compulsive liar and malingering drug addict who murdered two men out of cold-blooded callousness; or b: he was a suffering veteran who, involuntarily damaged by the combat atrocities he had witnessed, killed while under the delusion that he was acting in self-defense.

The truth, if truth in a case like this can be pinned down, likely lies somewhere in between. Jurors were quick to note that the suffering-veteran scenario may have been exaggerated: While serving as an active-duty Marine, Routh appears to have witnessed few or no combat atrocities working as a guard and mechanic in Iraq and on a humanitarian mission in Haiti.

After his discharge, his erratic behavior drove his family to despair. Prosecution experts called it drug abuse and personality disorder; defense lawyers called it delusional psychosis.

Overall, Routh did not make a particularly sympathetic defendant. Jurors apparently believed he was sufficiently shrewd to use the maudlin suffering-veteran scenario to excuse his own bad behavior.

“There’s a pattern that we saw,” Erath County juror Kristina Yager told ABC News on Wednesday. “He would get intoxicated, get in trouble and then the police would show up and he would say, ‘I’m a veteran, I have PTSD.' Every time something bad happened, he pulled that card.”

I don’t have a quarrel with the jury’s decision in this case, nor do I blame his lawyers, who did their best to defend them. And the prosecution was wise in avoiding the overreach of seeking the death penalty for a defendant who, while perhaps not technically insane, might still be regarded as “straight-up nuts.” Everybody did their job.

But once you remove the celebrity factor, and the treatment-of-veterans politics and the pro-military/anti-war split from the case, you are left with a drearily familiar question: What do we, as a society, do with our Eddie Ray Rouths?

What do we do with people who are clearly experiencing mental illness, who are spiraling out of control, whose behavior is tormenting their families, who aren’t getting adequate treatment or supervision from mental health agencies or Veterans Affairs facilities?

We send them to jail. By massive, grossly inefficient default, U.S. jails and prisons are the frequent (or final) destination for the most intractably straight-up nuts members of our society.

A report last year jointly commissioned by the National Sheriffs Association and a national nonprofit treatment advocacy group said there are about 35,000 patients diagnosed with severe mental illness in the nation’s shrinking network of public state psychiatric hospitals.

There are 10 times as many patients with the same diagnosis -- severe mental illness -- in U.S. jails and prisons. Overwhelmingly, prisons are our modern-day asylums.

It’s no surprise then that this is where Eddie Ray Routh will spend the rest of his life.

I’m not second-guessing the lawyers or the jurors in this case. They did what the system requires them to do.

A little second-guessing might be in order for the system itself.

Last-12-Exit

So you wanted to jury to say he was crazy?

Who Princess

Last-12-Exit said:

So you wanted to jury to say he was crazy?

Who are you asking?

I wasn't on the jury so I'm not gonna second guess them. I wish that he'd received better mental health care before any of this happened. I think that's what the editorial writer is suggesting.

Last-12-Exit

Who Princess said:

Last-12-Exit said:

So you wanted to jury to say he was crazy?

Who are you asking?

I wasn't on the jury so I'm not gonna second guess them. I wish that he'd received better mental health care before any of this happened. I think that's what the editorial writer is suggesting.

I was asking the OP. Isn't what Kyle was doing supposed to be helping his "mental health"?

SP96445

Last-12-Exit said:

So you wanted to jury to say he was crazy?

I had heard only filtered news through the outlets we all are exposed to. I think the editorial in the Dallas newspaper summed up the many currents flowing around this story.
I never thought the defendant should be found not guilty, what he did was evil.