Opinion ID: 1742511
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: The Videotape Excerpts of Defendant's Interview With Dr. Paul Ware

Text: The defendant also contends that the trial court erred by not allowing him to present excerpts of a videotape of his interview with Dr. Ware, a specialist in forensic psychiatry and neurology. The defendant raised this issue regarding the guilt phase in Assignment of Error No. 12. We treat both assignments together. Dr. Ware taped his interview with Langley in the spring of 1994. Although that session lasted five hours, the tape defense counsel proposed to introduce shows only 20-minutes of the interview. The parties first debated the admissibility of the tape during the guilt phase after Dr. Ware testified. In his testimony, and without objection from the State, Dr. Ware recounted defendant's statements to him attributing the victim's death to his attempt to exorcize the hallucinatory presence of Oscar Lee, the dead brother he never knew. [5] The defendant made no attempt to introduce the tape during Ware's testimony. In its rebuttal case, the State called Dr. Arretta Rathmell to recount for jurors an entirely different confession made to her by the defendant in 1992shortly after the offense and two years before Dr. Ware conducted his interview. According to Dr. Rathmell, who agreed that defendant suffered from a schizotypal personality disorder, the information that I got from Mr. Langley himself was that he knew he had killed Jeremy and he told me he knew it was wrong.... I distinctly remember it because I think it takes a good bit of fortitude to be able to say that, but he did say that, he did not hide it, he did not color that in any way; he said that's what he had done. When asked by the prosecutor to explain the obvious differences in the statements given by the defendant two years apart, Dr. Rathmell attributed defendant's 1994 statement to his desire to please adult figures to make up for a lack of parenting when he was a child and to his luck in finding a very caring attorney, and a very diligent one. The defense moved for a mistrial on grounds that Dr. Rathmell had implied that defense attorneys had manipulated Langley's responses to suit trial strategy. When the court denied that motion, counsel proposed that the jurors listen to the 20-minute excerpt from Dr. Ware's interview with the defendant to determine for themselves the credibility of the defendant's statements and whether Ricky Langley is telling the truth as he believes it on April 1st, 1994 or ... whether he just doesn't know what the truth is ... and we're in a position here where they can actually see something for themselves and figure out for themselves what's going on. After extensive argument, the court excluded the tape. I don't know of any situation, the judge observed, where the defendant can give a self-serving statement out of court and the jury sees it and reads it ... That would be the same thing as having him writing it all down and handing it to them to read. The court made the same ruling at the start of the penalty phase.