After Insanity Win in Murder One Case, Lawyer Accuses DA of 'Incompetence'
A lawyer who won a rare insanity acquittal from a Massachusetts jury last week for a client charged with the first-degree murder of his own mother has blasted the district attorney for taking the case to trial.
Despite three expert opinions that his 37-year-old client, Lee Chiero, is insane, Worcester District Attorney Joseph Early Jr. overruled a lower-level prosecutor’s decision to reduce the charge to second-degree murder, contends attorney Keith Halpern. One of the three experts was hired by the DA’s office, he says, and the decision not to reduce the charge was made by Early as the trial was about to begin, reports the Boston Globe.
A Worcester Superior Court jury deliberated about six hours Thursday before acquitting Chiero due to insanity. He has been sent to a state mental hospital for 40 days by the judge in the case, and Halpern says he expects Chiero will now spend years as an in-patient in such facilities.
Early’s indecision about the correct charge, even as the trial was beginning, “reflects incompetence,” Halpern tells the newspaper.
However, Early says he believes the “purposefulness” of Chiero’s actions after his mother’s death—washing his clothes and allegedly taking money from her purse and driving to another state—showed that he knew the difference between right and wrong.
In addition to allegedly stabbing his mother to death, Chiero—who has a lengthy medical history of severe mental illness, including delusional thinking—also was accused of videotaping her as she lay dying, the Globe reports.
His sister, Gina Mariona, says she begged the prosecution not to take the case to trial, where a portion of the video was viewed by her brother and the jury. “It was torture for me and torture for my brother, and my mother would never have wanted that to happen,” she says.
