THE GAZETTE
Page A-10
Wednesday, January 29, 2014 z
Defendants face challenges with insanity defense Navarro to introduce bill Successful plea would require medical evaluations, plus high threshold of evidence
BY
ST. JOHN BARNED-SMITH STAFF WRITER
The two women accused of slaying two toddlers in an attempted exorcism in Germantown face charges of first-degree murder and attempted first-degree murder, but haven’t been arraigned yet. Lawyers for the women, Zakieya L. Avery and Monifa D. Sanford, said it is too soon to discuss their clients’ cases in detail, including the possibility of them pursuing a “not criminally responsible,” or insanity, defense. During bail hearings for the two women this month, prosecutors said both women have a history of mental illness. According to Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy, Avery told police that she once was involuntarily committed for psychiatric care. Sanford told police she has tried to commit suicide twice. “The state’s attorney’s statements present a pretty compelling case for a lack of criminal responsibility,” said David Felsen, Sanford’s attorney, before declining to discuss his client’s case further. Byron L. Warnken, a University of Baltimore law professor, said that obtaining a “not criminally responsible” verdict is a “very difficult hurdle” for defendants. In Maryland, if a jury finds a person guilty, and the defendant’s lawyers can establish “not criminally responsible,” or NCR, the defendant cannot be punished, he said. “You can put me away, where you put other involuntarily committed people ... and I might get out in onetenth of the time, or 10 times longer, [than a convicted criminal]. It has nothing to do with punishment. It has to do with, ‘Do I pose a danger to myself, to others and to the property of others?,’” Warnken said. In a 911 call on the evening of Jan. 16, a neighbor told police that Avery
DEATHS
Continued from Page A-1 sessed the children. The women told investigators that they saw the children’s eyes turn black, and observed demons possessing them, skipping from child to child, Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy said at Avery’s Jan. 21
left one of her children in her car for about an hour. During the call, Avery came out of her house and accosted him. In the call, which police released to the public, the caller told dispatchers Avery was “responding to internal stimuli.” The caller explained that Avery appeared to be talking to herself. During Avery’s bail review, McCarthy said the women told police they had seen demons possessing the children and turning their eyes black. Avery has been transferred to a secure psychiatric hospital. Before her case can go forward, mental health experts have to evaluate whether she is legally “competent,” or understands the charges against her and can assist in her defense. A similar evaluation has been ordered for Sanford. Dr. Neil Blumberg, a forensic psychiatrist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, said that when defendants might have mental illnesses, health officials check if there’s a history of mental illness or drug abuse, and learn about their early development. In cases in which mothers kill their children and there’s no history of being abused or abusing children, most are psychotic or responding to hallucinations and delusions, he said. If Avery and Sanford are found not competent, they will go through a process to “restore” them to competency, lawyers said. That would involve medication and other treatment. Judicial proceedings would continue after they finally reached competency, McCarthy said. The length of that process varies widely, possibly taking months or years, said Steven D. Kupferberg, a local attorney. Once restored to competency, the women would be evaluated by a state psychiatrist to determine whether they were “not criminally responsible” when the accusations took place. In that case, their defense attorneys would need to prove that their clients are either unable to appreciate the criminality of their conduct or unable to conform their conduct to law, said Paul Kemp, a local defense attorney. Then, they would
plead guilty, but not criminally responsible. “The only cases where the defendant is usually found to be NCR is where they are separated from reality, or psychotic,” Kemp said. Waging an NCR defense requires a defendant to admit to the facts of the case. “The initial burden is on the defendant. ... You have to come in with an opinion [of NCR] from a psychiatrist,” Kemp said. “The hardest thing is you don’t have a client on the other end of the line helping you when they really have that condition,” he said. Scott Shellenberger, state’s attorney for Baltimore County, would not comment on the charges against Avery and Sanford. Speaking of NCR cases generally, he said: “The problem is whenever someone does a particularly heinous act, it’s normal for regular folks to say, ‘They must be crazy,’ but that doesn’t mean they weren’t criminally responsible.” One way evaluators try to determine that is if a defendant tries to conceal the crime. “That’s best way to know — if they did it, and tried to hide it, that’s the best indication they knew what they were doing was wrong,” Shellenberger said. Rick Finci, a local attorney who has handled many NCR cases, said NCR pleas “are not extremely popular defenses.” The reason, he said, is that “jurors are scared of these people, the people who are so severely mentally ill and have not been treated and act out violently.” Even if an NCR case goes to trial, there is a jury to convince, Kupferberg said. Cases requiring an NCR defense are usually so serious, people look at them with a “fine-tooth comb and magnifying glass,” Kupferberg said. “And their sympathies won’t be with the defendant. They will be with the victim, and generally, that’s what makes the most difference,” he said.
bail review. The women, who lived on Cherry Bend Drive in Germantown, have been charged with two counts of first-degree murder and two counts of attempted first-degree murder in the deaths of Avery’s 1-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter on Jan. 17. Police also have charged the two
women with attempting to kill Avery’s two other children, ages 5 and 8. Police found the two toddlers washed and wrapped in blankets on Avery’s bed. Avery and Sanford were arrested Jan. 17, and have been held without bail since.
sjbsmith@gazette.net
sjbsmith@gazette.net
for affordable insurance Measure would require county contractors to provide affordable care or its cash equivalent n
BY
RYAN MARSHALL STAFF WRITER
A bill scheduled to be introduced next week by Montgomery Nancy Navarro would require businesses who contract with the county to provide affordable health insurance for workers or a cash benefit that would allow workers to buy their own insurance. Navarro (D-Dist. 4) of Silver Spring said she plans to introduce the bill at the council’s Feb. 4 meeting. The bill would amend the county’s living wage law to require contractors and subcontractors who are subject to that law to provide affordable health insurance or an hourly “health benefit” to let employees buy insurance on their own. It would apply to new contracts and would not require the county to rebid existing contacts, according to Navarro’s letter. But it would allow the county to modify existing long-term contracts that don’t include affordable health insurance to cover the cost of providing insurance to full-time employees of up to $4,000 per year. The county’s living wage law requires contractors to pay employees at least $13.95 an hour, which totals just below $30,0000 a year for a full-time employee. “Anyone who works a full-time job should be able to afford health insurance,” Navarro wrote in a Jan. 13 letter to her colleagues on the council. The current living wage law allows contractors to pay below the living wage if they provide health insurance. But Navarro said that out of about 400 contractors to whom the living wage applies, only one claims the health care credit. “As a local government, we may not be able to shoulder the burden of providing healthcare to all residents, but we can at least ensure that all employees that perform services for the County have access to affordable health insurance,” Navarro wrote in the letter to her colleagues.
“Anyone who works a full-time job should be able to afford health insurance.” Nancy Navarro, county councilwoman She said the measure was partially inspired by situations in the fall in which workers at two of the companies that provide trash pickup for the county were part of labor disputes partially involving workers’ desire for affordable health care. Workers at Gaithersburg’s Potomac Disposal reached an agreement with the company’s management after a 10-day strike. The agreement included a pay raise for workers, one paid holiday and sick and vacation days for workers, but the sides were not able to agree on a plan to provide affordable health care. Workers at Laurel’s Unity Disposal and Recycling staged a oneday walkout on Jan. 21 over what they said was management’s refusal to acknowledge the workers’ desire to form a union to help negotiate a new contract. Workers are seeking better wages and working conditions and affordable health care. Councilman Marc Elrich (D-At Large) of Takoma Park, who earlier this year sponsored a bill raising the county’s minimum wage to $11.50 an hour by 2017, said he’s interested in Navarro’s bill but hadn’t seen it yet wants to know how it fits into the living wage law. The council would have to decide what is a reasonable price for insurance, Elrich said. Navarro’s bill would require health plans to meet the affordability definition in the federal Affordable Care Act, which defines affordable coverage as that in which an individual’s share of an annual premium for self-coverage is no more than 9.5 percent of their annual household income. “I’m interested, but I have to be sure it’s going to work,” Elrich said. rmarshall@gazette.net
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