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Rockefeller team seen facing uphill battle with insanity defense

E-mail|Link|Comments () May 28, 2009 03:45 PM

By Martin Finucane, Globe Staff

Massachusetts attorneys who have used the insanity defense say the legal team for the man who calls himself Clark Rockefeller faces a difficult battle in mounting that defense for their client, who faces parental kidnapping charges in Suffolk Superior Court. But at least one saw a gleam of hope for the defendant.

Attorney Joseph J. Balliro, who unsuccessfully used the defense in the case of the cross-dressing dermatologist Richard Sharpe who fatally shot his wife in Wenham in 2000, said Rockefeller's legal team faces "an uphill battle, but not an impossible one."

"I think, perhaps, the key to success in this case is that it's not a first-degree murder case," he said. "Ordinarily, in the great majority of cases, that defense is raised where there's a homicide, when somebody was killed. This may sound strange to you. … But as far as I'm concerned you've got a very sympathetic defendant in this case. He's charged with kidnapping his child, not a stranger's child. There isn't any scintilla, the slightest bit, of evidence that he did anything to hurt this child."

The evidence seems to suggest, to the contrary, that "he loved this child passionately. He treated her very, very well," Balliro said.

Another reason defense attorney Jeffrey Denner and his team might be successful, Balliro said, is that in murder cases, juries tend to be concerned that those who are acquitted by reason of insanity may be released and harm people again.

"What's the concern here if Rockefeller gets out? He's not going to kidnap anybody's kids and he's not going to hurt anybody," said Balliro. "I wouldn't be too surprised if a jury said, 'Hey, look, this poor son of a gun, we're going to treat him differently" from someone who has committed a horrific crime.

Successful uses of the insanity defense are rare, said Kevin Reddington, who was unsuccessful in using it during the trial of Michael McDermott, who shot and killed seven of his coworkers at his Wakefield company in 2000, in the worst case of workplace violence in the state's history.

Reddington said he believed that one key for the defense is to show that the person has had mental illness problems in the past.

"It's very important that you have to be able to document a person has had a lengthy history of interaction with healthcare providers, has been in hospitals, on medications. Or there are documented cases of psychological breaks or psychological incidents that have been treated in the past," he said.

"Typically, a lack of criminal responsibility defense is a hard sell with the jury," he said.

Prosecutors say Rockefeller's real name is Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter and that he is a con man who meticulously schemed to kidnap his 7-year-old daughter through months of painstaking planning.

Denner said in opening statements today that his client believed he was communicating telepathically with his daughter and "she was saying she needed to be saved." Denner described Rockefeller as living in a "magical, insane world" and told the jury that mental health experts will testify that Rockefeller suffered from a "such fundamental mental illness" that his increasingly grandiose lies sealed him off from his own memories.