Stories: All-New Tales

The judge asked, “Competent to stand trial?”

“Yessir. We’re saying he was insane at the time of commission. No sense of right or wrong. No sense of reality.”

The judge grunted.

The insanity defense is based on one overriding concept in jurisprudence: responsibility. At what point are we responsible for acts we commit? If we cause an accident and we’re sued in civil court for damages, the law asks, would a reasonably prudent person have, say, driven his car on a slippery road at thirty-five miles per hour? If the jury says yes, then we’re not responsible for the crash.

If we’re arrested for a crime, the law asks, did we act knowingly and intentionally to break a law? If we didn’t, then we’re not guilty.

There are, in fact, two ways in which sanity arises in a criminal court. One is when the defendant is so out of it that he can’t participate in his own trial. That U.S. Constitution thing: the right to confront your accusers.

But this isn’t what most people familiar with Boston Legal or Perry Mason think of as the insanity defense and, as Bob Ringling had confirmed, it wasn’t an issue in State v. Kobel.

More common is when defense lawyers invoke various offshoots of M’Naughten rule, which holds that if the defendant lacked the capacity to know he was doing something wrong when he committed the crime, he can’t be found guilty. This isn’t to say he’s going scot-free; he’ll get locked up in a mental ward until it’s determined that he’s no longer dangerous.

This was Bob Ringling’s claim regarding Martin Kobel.

But Glenn Hollow exhaled a perplexed laugh. “He wasn’t insane. He was a practicing therapist with an obsession over a pretty woman who was ignoring him. Special circumstances. I want guilty, I want the needle. That’s it.”

Ringling said to Rollins, “Insanity. You sentence him to indefinite incarceration in Butler, Judge. We won’t contest it. No trial. Everybody wins.”

Hollow said, “Except the other people he kills when they let him out in five years.”

“Ah, you just want a feather in your cap for when you run for AG. He’s a media bad boy.”

“I want justice,” Hollow said, supposing he was sounding pretentious. And not caring one whit. Nor admitting that, yeah, he did want the feather, too.

“What’s the evidence for the looney tunes?” the judge asked. He had a very different persona when he was in chambers compared with when he was in the courtroom, and presumably different yet at Etta’s Diner, eating corned beef.

“He absolutely believes he didn’t do anything wrong. He was saving the children in Annabelle’s class. I’ve been over this with him a dozen times. He believes it.”

“Believes what exactly?” the judge asked.

“That she was possessed. By something like a ghost. I’ve looked it up. Some cult thing on the Internet. Some spirit or something makes you lose control, lose your temper and beat the crap out of your wife or kids. Even makes you kill people. It’s called a neme.” He spelled it.

“Neme.”

Hollow said, “I’ve looked it up too, Judge. You can look it up. We all can look it up. Which is just what Kobel did. To lay the groundwork for claiming insanity. He killed a hot young woman who rejected him. And now he’s pretending he believes in ’em to look like he’s nuts.”

“If that’s the case,” Ringling said gravely, “then he’s been planning ever since he was a teenager to kill a woman he met two weeks ago.”

“What’s that?”

“His parents died in a car crash when he was in high school. He had a break with reality, the doctors called it. Diagnosed as a borderline personality.”

“Like my cousin,” the judge said. “She’s awkward. The wife and I never invite her over, if we can avoid it.”

“Kobel got involuntary commitment for eight months back then, talking about these creatures that possessed the driver who killed his family. Same thing as now.”

“But he had to go to shrink school,” the judge pointed out. “He graduated. That’s not crazy in my book.”

Hollow leaped in with, “Exactly. He has a master’s in psychology. One in social work. Good grades. Sees patients. And he’s written books. For God’s sake.”

“One of which I happen to have with me and which I will be introducing into evidence. Thank you, Glenn, for bringing it up.” The defense lawyer opened his briefcase and dropped a 10-pound stack of 8½-by-11 sheets on the judge’s desk. “Self-published, by the way. And written by hand.”

Hollow looked it over. He had good eyes but it was impossible to read any of the text except the title because it was in such tiny handwriting. There had to be a thousand words per page, in elegant, obsessive script.

Biblical Evidence of Malevolent

Emotional ENERGY Incorporated into Psyches

By Martin Kobel

© All rights reserved

“All rights reserved?” Hollow snorted. “Who’s going to plagiarize this crap? And what’s with the capitalization?”

“Glenn, this is one of about thirty volumes. He’s been writing these things for twenty years. And it’s the smallest one.”

The prosecutor repeated, “He’s faking.”

But the judge was skeptical. “Going back all those years?”

“Okay, he’s quirky. But this man is dangerous. Two of his patients killed themselves under circumstances that make it seem like he suggested they do it. Another one’s serving five years because he attacked Kobel in his office. He claimed the doctor provoked him. And Kobel broke into a funeral home six years ago and was caught f**king around with the corpses.”

“What?”

“Not that way. He was dissecting them. Looking for evidence of these things, these nemes.”

Ringling said happily, “There’s another book he wrote on the autopsy. Eighteen hundred pages. Illustrated.”

“It wasn’t an autopsy, Bob. It was breaking into a funeral home and f**king around with corpses.” Hollow was getting angry. But maybe it’s just a neme, he thought cynically. “He goes to conferences.”

“Paranormal conferences. Wacko conferences. Full of wackos just like him.”

“Jesus Christ, Bob. The people who cop insanity pleas’re paranoid schizos. They don’t bathe, they take Haldol and lithium, they’re delusional. They don’t go to f**king Starbucks and ask for an extra shot of syrup.”