Criminal Justice
NYC Lawyer Gets 20-Yr. Commitment for Random Car Shooting
Posted Jul 15, 2008, 03:06 pm CDT
By Molly McDonough
A former Manhattan attorney who was found not guilty by reason of mental defect of shooting a shotgun into a woman's car, then breaking into his estranged wife's home, was committed to a psychiatric facility for 20 years.
But a defense lawyer for Eric Witlin says Witlin, 40 of Stamford, is no longer a threat now that he's being properly treated. The shooting incident apparently stemmed from effects of Witlin's taking Adderall and Prozac, prescriptions for attention deficit disorder and depression, the Stamford Advocate reports.
During Witlin's episode, he reportedly believed his wife and son were about to be kidnapped. Testimony at his trial revealed that he began exhibiting bizarre behavior in the weeks preceding the incident, including that he would sit shirtless in his Manhattan office, the Advocate reports.
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Posted by anonymous - 1 month, 1 week, 6 days, 22 hours, 15 minutes ago
There was a WSJ article just yesterday about Prozac and other depressants. It said that the reports of them causing suicide were distorted statistics. Maybe he read the articles about Prozac and faked his mental distress so that he could claim a temporary insanity defense. Nothing in the WSJ article described anything like this kind of behavior. The article said that all the Prozac studies were just recently made public.
I thought that if there really is physical mental illness (schizophrenia) that it usually shows itself in the late teens or early 20’s but this guy was 40.
The shooting at the van could just be a planned cover-up for the planned attack against his wife.
Did he have a financial motivation for shooting at his ex wife--alimony, child support etc.?
On the other hand, that 48 Hours Mystery, reporting of an actual murder, concerned a guy that reportedly hired a contract killer and he was also taking strong pain killers
But the Adderall listed here is a form of amphetamine. On Wikipedia, there is no mention of violent behavior being connected to Adderall only “severe social disability”, which it doesn’t define. Under “amphetamine psychosis” but that doesn’t mention violence either just examining, sorting, disassembling, and cleaning, thinking one is affected w parasites, and “n chronic amphetamine users, with over 80% of users reporting the presence of hallucinatory experiences[2], typically as visual or auditory experiences. Delusions, paranoia, fears about persecution, hyperactivity and panic “
Wikipedia says “Among the common adverse effects associated with fluoxetine (prozac) and listed in the prescribing information, the effects with the greatest difference from placebo are nausea (22% vs 9% for placebo), insomnia (19% vs 10% for placebo), somnolence (12% vs 5% for placebo), anorexia (10% vs 3% for placebo), anxiety (12% vs 6% for placebo), nervousness (13% vs 8% for placebo), asthenia (11% vs 6% for placebo) and tremor (9% vs 2% for placebo). Those that most often resulted in interruption of the treatment were anxiety, insomnia, and nervousness (1-2% each), and in pediatric trials—mania (2%)” So there is no mention there of psychosis either.
The article in the Stamford paper doesn’t mention anything about the quality of his work as a city attorney.