Loukaitis’ Mental State Key To Case Weeks Of Testimony Begin Today In Seattle

A King County jury today begins sorting through the confusing, unsettling story of Barry Loukaitis.

After four weeks of competing expert testimony, they’ll have only one real question to decide: Is the 16-year-old Moses Lake teenager guilty of three aggravated murders or was he legally insane?

Grant County Prosecutor John Knodell will tell the jury that emotional problems aside, the troubled teenager knew what he was doing on Feb. 2, 1996, when he took two handguns and a rifle into a classroom at Frontier Junior High School.

The youth’s defense lawyers will have the far more difficult challenge, say attorneys who’ve invoked the insanity defense before.

“It’s very rare to win such cases,” said former Spokane public defender Richard Cease, now a private defense attorney.

The teen’s defense attorney, Michael Frost, will say that Loukaitis suffered intense mood swings connected to bipolar personality disorder - the modern name for manic-depressive disorder.

He’ll tell the jury Loukaitis underwent a “psychotic episode” during intense personal distress and didn’t understand what he was doing the day of those murders.

The other side only has to show Loukaitis knew right from wrong when he gunned down classmates Manuel Vela and Arnold Fritz and then his math teacher, Leona Caires.

If prosecutors get a guilty verdict, the teen will spend his life in prison with no chance for parole.

If found insane, Loukaitis would be confined inside a psychiatric hospital until he’s no longer a threat to others.

In Washington, jurors have to believe a person charged with a crime suffers from “a defect of reason” or is fully unable to “appreciate the nature and quality of his acts.”

“The standard of proving legal insanity is very high in this state,” said Spokane attorney Mark Mays.

Mays is also a psychologist who was hired to evaluate Loukaitis.

Because the definition of insanity is vague, most jurors end up feeling confused and uncertain, added Spokane attorney Mark Vovos.

“Juries don’t understand (legal insanity) easily and they don’t accept it,” he added.

Another reason the insanity defense works infrequently is the anxiety jurors feel about crime and public safety.

Even when evidence of insanity exists, jurors tend to be conservative and choose guilt over insanity, experts say.

Two other factors tilting jurors against insanity verdicts are hearing expert witnesses give opposite opinions on a person’s mental state, and a lack of knowledge about what will happen to a person found insane at trial.

When juries hear experts give conflicting views, they often throw up their hands and make a decision on gut instincts, said Spokane public defender Don Westerman.

They also act cautiously because courts do not allow jurors to know what penalties or consequences follow a verdict, said Tacoma forensic psychologist Greg Gagliardi.

“They tend to believe, wrongly, they will be sending the person back on the street scot-free if they decide there’s an insanity defense,” Gagliardi said.

Spokane attorney Vovos discovered, in 1972, how hard it is to prove legal insanity to jurors.

He was one of two attorneys defending Louis “Sonny” Ives, a Colville tribal member who was charged with murdering his brother-in-law during an argument.

During a trial, Ives shouted out curses, often holding a Bible. At one point during testimony, Ives scuffled with Vovos, punched him in the face, then jumped into the jury box where he had to be restrained and taken from the court.

Even then, the jury found Ives guilty of murder, Vovos said.

Despite the high publicity that insanity defense trials grab - Jeffrey Dahmer, John duPont and Ted Kaczynski, to name three - they happen rarely compared to all criminal trials, added Gagliardi.

“Far fewer than one out of every 100 felony charges results in a plea of insanity,” Gagliardi said.

Among those cases that go to trial, the success rate - being found insane instead of a guilty verdict - is also extremely rare, said Gagliardi.

Spokane attorneys have had relatively abysmal luck trying to win cases using the insanity defense.

Cease - one of the area’s best-known defense attorneys - can think of only one major victory in a high-profile trial.

That involved the 1983 insanity verdict for accused murderer Sheryl Fleming.

Fleming, a 19-year-old wife of a Fairchild airman, was charged with first-degree murder after suffocating a child she was baby sitting.

Cease and current assistant federal defender Roger Peven defended Fleming and convinced a jury that she was a victim of split personalities.

Jurors believed the expert testimony that Cease brought into court, showing that the young woman had a history of severe emotional problems going back several years before the murder.

After the not guilty verdict, Fleming was confined at Eastern State Hospital in Medical Lake for psychiatric care.

After 10 years of treatment and evaluation, doctors decided Fleming no longer posed a danger to others. A Spokane court then ordered her released. She has since remarried and left the area.

Gagliardi and others who’ve analyzed the insanity defense say attorneys now weigh the odds carefully before attempting that tactic.

In lesser crimes, in fact, most attorneys would rather go to trial and face conviction, he said.

When a defendant wins an insanity defense, the result is confinement that usually exceeds the prison term for that crime, Gagliardi said.

“That’s what the figures nationwide show, that prison terms for lesser crimes are shorter than the time spent in psychiatric confinement,” he said.

With stiff odds against winning insanity verdicts, some attorneys opt for a half-measure. As in the case of convicted double murderer Blake Pirtle, defense attorneys sometimes don’t file an insanity defense but claim their client was suffering from diminished capacity.

Pirtle’s attorney, Donald Westerman, said that his client did kill two Burger King employees in 1992. But because Pirtle had been using vast quantities of illegal drugs, Westerman argued that his client had a diminished mental ability - not the same as insanity.

If a jury accepted that premise, Westerman would have argued that Pirtle could not, at the time of the murders, form intent - a key element of the crimes he was facing.

Jurors didn’t buy that argument however. They convicted Pirtle of aggravated, premeditated murder and sentenced him to death.

Attorneys constantly juggle their options.

“Sometimes,” added Vovos, “it’s the only defense you have.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Graphic: When the insanity defense works, then what?