In Idaho, there's no insanity defense for accused shooter who says he was fighting aliens

By Rick Anderson

Aug. 17, 2016 10:50 AM PT

Reporting from Seattle — In most states, the man accused of shooting pastor Tim Remington six times in broad daylight might have a strong defense to offer at trial.

Kyle Odom, a 30-year-old Marine Corps veteran, has a history of mental illness and said he believed that Remington was part of an alien conspiracy to enslave the human race.

Though severely wounded, Remington survived the March shooting in a Coeur d’Alene church parking lot and said he had forgiven his assailant. Unfortunately for Odom, Idaho is one of four states — along with Kansas, Montana and Utah — that don’t allow defendants to plead not guilty by reason of insanity.

What typically happens in such cases is that the accused will seek a plea deal and hope that the judge takes their mental condition into account when passing sentence, legal experts said. Critics contend this does not provide sufficient protection against long prison terms or the death penalty for defendants who might be confined to a psychiatric hospital if they were charged in another state.

“Idaho’s rather rare method of dealing with the issue of criminal defendants’ mental health impairments does result in uneven treatment in comparison with most other states,” said Marc Pearce, assistant dean at the University of Nebraska College of Law, in an email.

In May, the Kootenai County prosecutor’s office dropped a charge of attempted murder against Odom and instead charged him with aggravated battery. That did not change the penalty he could face: up to 15 years in prison. Odom was also charged with using a deadly weapon in committing a felony, a sentence enhancement that could mean an additional 15 years.

Attempts to resolve the case through mediation were not successful. Last week, prosecutors asked that Odom receive a mental health evaluation, to determine whether he is competent to stand trial.

“Once he is deemed to be competent, the case will proceed in the normal course,” Barry McHugh, the county’s prosecuting attorney, told The Times. He declined to discuss the case further. Defense attorneys did not respond to requests for comment.

Odom’s mental state has been an issue from the start.

Two days after the shooting, Odom was arrested in Washington. He wasn’t exactly laying low. Police said he was caught throwing documents and computer flash drives over a fence onto the White House lawn.

According to a rambling, 30-plus-page manifesto sent to several Idaho television stations, Odom thought he was being tormented by “hypersexual,” mind-controlling Martians.

He wrote that he attempted suicide twice, enclosing himself in his car with a lit charcoal grill, and also sought help at a local Department of Veterans Affairs hospital. The only option left, he said, was to go after the aliens.

In a Facebook post while on the run, Odom said that Remington was “one of them.” “I shot pastor Tim 12 times,” he wrote. “There is no way any human could have survived that event.”

The manifesto included the names of other suspected Martians — about 50 members of Congress among them. “I wish I was joking,” Odom said, adding that he considered himself “100% sane, 0% crazy.”

That’s not how it looked to legal and mental health experts. But Idaho abolished the insanity defense in 1982, a decision prompted by outrage over the acquittal by reason of insanity of John W. Hinckley Jr. in an assassination attempt on President Reagan.

Attempts to challenge the constitutionality of the decision have so far been unsuccessful.

In 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal brought by James Delling, an Idaho man who was sentenced to life in prison for killing two friends and wounding another after becoming convinced that they were trying to destroy his brain.

Delling was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and argued that the lack of an insanity defense violated his due process rights.

The Idaho Supreme Court disagreed because state law permits the use of evidence of mental illness to undermine the prosecution’s argument that a defendant was capable of forming the intent necessary to commit a crime, and because trial judges are required to consider the person’s mental condition when passing sentence.

“In the absence of an insanity defense, Delling is still able to present a defense; it just takes a different form,” Justice Robert Burdick wrote in the court’s decision. “If the state cannot prove criminal intent beyond a reasonable doubt, a defendant, sane or not, will be found not guilty.”

In an article for the American Psychological Assn. in 2013, Pearce said Delling’s case was noteworthy because the trial court had found that he could not appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct, which would satisfy a common legal test for insanity. But because Delling admitted that he intended to kill his victims, his mental condition was of no help to him in the case.

Opponents of the insanity defense note that mental health treatment is available to prison inmates, although some experts say the environment is far from ideal for such care.

Special mental health courts, part of a nationwide network, can also get defendants into treatment and have been credited with keeping at least a few people out of jail. But the courts don’t exist in every county, and they don’t generally accept people accused of violent offenses and sex crimes.

The Treatment Advocacy Center, a Virginia-based nonprofit that promotes access to mental health care, reported in 2014 that Ada County Jail in Boise and the Idaho state prison in Kuna probably both held more people with serious mental illness than the two state psychiatric hospitals combined.

“The problems are predictable,” the group said. In one month in 2013, guards found four inmates hanging from sheets at prisons and jails around the state.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the American Bar Association have joined forces with other groups in Idaho to lobby for changes in how the state deals with the criminally insane.

Their first goal is to get a law enacted that would prevent the state from carrying out the death penalty against convicts with severe mental illness, said Kathy Griesmyer, a public policy analyst for the ACLU in Boise.

Such a law could remove one or two of the nine people currently on death row in the state, she said. But it wouldn’t help defendants like Odom who face lengthy prison terms.

Remington, whose survival was described by members of his Altar Church as a miracle, has said that his assailant should do some time.

“We don’t send a message that you can shoot somebody and not pay the price,” he told the Spokesman-Review in May. But he said he would also like to help Odom.

“How he is rehabilitated,” the pastor said, “I would love to be a part of that process.”

Anderson is a special correspondent.

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