New details released Tuesday in a grand jury indictment of Robert Tulloch will shape arguments at the April trial, but the precise effect of these revelations remains unclear, according to legal experts contacted by The Dartmouth.
Whether or not the latest information -- which states that Tulloch and James Parker visited four houses before targeting the Zantops -- will endanger Tulloch's insanity plea depends largely on the medical conditions that defense attorneys use to build their arguments, Boston University School of Law professor Wendy Kaplan said.
Even Tulloch's defense team may not yet realize how large or small an impact the revelations will create because lawyers are likely still in the process of gathering and analyzing information from medical experts, Vermont Law School professor Michael Mello said. Preparing large-scale cases for trial "is very much a dynamic, rather than static, process."
On Wednesday, The Boston Globe credited an anonymous source close to the defendant's family with the claim that Tulloch's defense will center on a diagnosis of bipolar disorder Tulloch allegedly acquired while in prison.
If those statements prove true, bipolar disorder "can be serious enough to support an insanity defense," Mello said. Defense attorneys may, however, encounter other difficulties in arguing their case. "Tulloch is very smart, and it's always a hard sell for the jury to make that leap from intelligence to insanity."
Meanwhile, prosecutors have placed themselves in what Mello called an "awkward position" with respect to Parker, who accepted a reduced charge of accomplice to second-degree murder as part of a plea agreement requiring him to testify at Tulloch's trial in April.
If the new information -- which is widely believed to have come from Parker -- is true, it reveals that authorities made a deal with a suspect who was involved in the planning of this crime over a long period of time.
Unless Parker lies to authorities, his contract with the prosecution leaves him immune to further charges.
One quirk jurors will face at Tulloch's trial is that New Hampshire is the only state without any kind of statutory standard of insanity. In other states, judges instruct juries that defendants must be proven insane by one of a half-dozen possible legal distinctions.
The most common guideline requires lawyers to prove whether or not the defendant understood the difference between right and wrong at the time of their offense. Andrea Yates, who drowned her five children last June, faces this standard at her Texas trial.
A declining number of states also include an "irresistible impulse" clause, which allows defense attorneys to argue that even if their client could distinguish right from wrong, he or she may have been "psychologically incapable of stopping," Mello said. If the defendant would have committed his or her crime even if a policeman was visible, then he or she fills this requirement.
Mello argued that each legal distinction lacks a degree of precision, describing the process as "like trying to nail a jellyfish to a wall."
Additionally, while law professors grapple with putting terms like insanity into a "legal and linguistic context," Mello noted that in practice they probably make little difference since jurors can usually make insanity judgments based on their own common sense.
Invoking a Supreme Court Justice's definition of pornography, Mello said that when it comes to insanity, "you know it when you see it."
