Brent Batten: Damas case raises questions as old as mankind, veteran attorney says

Mesac Damas must be mad.

To kill your five children and your wife indicates a mental state that can only be described as insane.

Yet there’s no guarantee he’ll be declared insane by the court.

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At the same time, by all appearances he’s guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of the gruesome 2009 killings at the family’s North Naples town house.

But his own efforts to admit to them in court and accept punishment have been rebuffed, leading to a yearslong quandary that shows no signs of ending anytime soon.

It’s a confounding mix of archaic legal tenets, precedent-setting possibilities and fundamental questions as old as humanity itself, says Jerry Berry, one of Collier County’s most experienced criminal defense attorneys.

To the layman, the issues might appear simple. Damas, 41, admits to committing the crimes and wants to plead guilty and receive the death penalty.

Either let him enter the plea, or, in the alternative, declare him insane and ship him off to a mental institution.

But Berry says those options, as satisfying as they might be, aren’t available to Judge Fred Hardt, the latest in a series of judges to preside over the long-running case.

“You can’t stand up and say, 'I’m guilty,’ and then the court says, ‘OK, I sentence you to death,’ ” Hardt told Damas at a hearing Friday to determine if Damas is competent to dismiss his court-appointed lawyers. “It doesn’t work that way.”

An onlooker might ask why it doesn’t work that way.

Because, Berry said, more is at stake than just the fate of Mesac Damas.

“Laypeople, understandably, want to apply a solution to a particular case. What the courts do, what they have to come up with, is a standard that applies to all future cases,” he said.

For instance, if someone like Damas is allowed to plead guilty in his present state, it could set a precedent for future cases in which the facts aren’t so clear.

“What do you do the next time when someone pleads guilty to a case and we find out later, after they’ve been executed, they’re innocent?” Berry asked.

Damas was initially deemed competent to stand trial, then in early 2014 was deemed incompetent. After three months in a mental hospital he was declared competent again.

Hardt on Friday ordered another mental health examination for Damas. The judge will rule later on whether Damas is competent enough to fire his lawyers and represent himself, a different standard than competence to stand trial.

Since his competence is in question, the court can’t allow him to make a decision, such as pleading guilty, that could cost him his life, Berry explained.

Under the law, incompetence and insanity aren’t the same thing, Berry points out.

Insanity would only be determined through a trial and only then if the defense invokes the insanity defense.

Florida is one of just a handful of states that uses the M’Naghten Rule for insanity. Rising from English law in the 1800s, the rule, sometimes spelled McNaughten, hinges on whether the defendant can determine right from wrong.

Most states use an “irresistible impulse” test. Simply put, it requires evidence of mental illness and that “the mental illness caused the inability to control one’s own actions or conform one’s conduct to the law.”

Berry uses his own experience to highlight the difficulty in proving insanity under the M’Naghten Rule.

In 1995, Berry’s client Laine Jumper picked up his 9-year-old daughter from school, put a blanket over her head and fatally shot her.

He called police, saying he needed help because he was killing his family.

In the weeks before, he had been in and out of psychiatric wards at least three times, Berry said. He was diagnosed as manic depressive and had his medications changed repeatedly.

After being released on one of the occasions, he went to Walmart and bought a gun. Police found him outside the store putting it in the trash.

At one point he sat in the psychiatric ward lobby for an entire day before a nurse asked if she could help him. He told her he had already killed his family and himself.

Soon after, he bought another gun, this one at a pawn shop, and used it to kill his daughter.

“The guy is clearly, clearly insane,” Berry said.

But since he told police in his initial 911 call that he needed help because he was killing his family, the jury decided he knew killing was wrong and therefore didn’t meet the definition of insanity under the M’Naghten Rule.

Ironically, during the penalty phase of the trial, psychiatrists stated that Jumper could not control his impulses to kill his family, testimony that would have helped prove insanity had the irresistible impulse rule been in effect in Florida.

“In any other state, he probably would have met the standard of being insane,” Berry said.

Berry said the law and society in general don’t understand mental illness. “We’re so archaic. We don’t know enough to be able to handle these tough situations.”

Civilization has struggled with the issues raised by the Damas case throughout time, Berry said.

“It comes down to the old issue: Are there evil people out there who do evil things, or are there things that cause people to do evil acts? That’s the question humans have been arguing about since the Garden of Eden, since Cain and Abel.”