Wyatt: Langley guilty (11/7)

Posted November 7, 2009 at 3:05 am
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By VINCENT LUPO
AMERICAN PRESS

Like two juries before him, Judge Robert Wyatt rejected Ricky Langley’s insanity defense Friday and found the defendant guilty of killing 6-year-old Jeremy Guillory on Feb. 7, 1992.

Langley now faces a mandatory penalty of life in prison without parole on the second-degree murder conviction. Wyatt will impose that sentence Dec. 10.

Langley claimed in all three of his trials that he was legally insane — or could not tell right from wrong — when he strangled the Iowa, La., boy.

But a Baton Rouge jury in 1994 rejected that claim, as did a jury from New Orleans in 2003. Both trials were moved outside Calcasieu Parish due to pretrial publicity.

In the first trial, jurors found Langley guilty of first-degree murder and recommended a death sentence. In the second trial, also on first-degree murder, jurors returned a guilty verdict to the lesser offense of second-degree murder.

Higher courts overturned both convictions.

Judge Wilford Carter, to whom the case was assigned after the second reversal, ruled Langley couldn’t be retried on capital murder. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed.

So this week, Langley stood trial on second-degree murder. When Carter had the case, Langley gave up his right to jury trial and asked for a trial by judge.

Carter was later removed from the case, which was randomly assigned to Wyatt, who alone heard Langley’s trial.

In returning his verdict Friday afternoon, Wyatt said the state had proved beyond all doubt that Langley killed Guillory. Defense attorneys had all but conceded that point at the outset.

As to the issue of specific intent to kill or harm, Wyatt said Langley, a convicted child molester, was tempted when the boy showed up at the home where Langley lived.

Langley admitted to police he was attracted to the boy the first time he saw him. Wyatt said Langley recognized, “due to his past indiscretions, that he could not let this young man live.” Because of the boy’s own demons, Langley felt he was doing the boy a favor, Wyatt said.

The main issue in the case, Wyatt said, was whether Langley knew right from wrong at the time of the slaying. He acknowledged that proof of insanity is a less ridged burden than the proof required to convict — which is beyond a reasonable doubt.

Wyatt admitted he was frustrated on Thursday by the differing testimony of two experts in the case, one for each side. But, he said, after cooler reflection, and after reading transcripts of testimony given previously by another psychiatrist, he realized the experts’ testimony wasn’t as disparate as he perceived.

He said the common thread in all of the doctors’ diagnoses was pedophilia — an impulse illness, a serious personality disorder. It is a non-psychotic diagnosis, not a major thinking disorder, not schizophrenia, and not manic-depressive illness, he said.

He disputed defense witness Dr. Rahn Bailey’s diagnosis of schizophrenia. Wyatt said all doctors acknowledged it is difficult to perceive what is going on in someone’s mind.

Wyatt said he believes that when Langley was choking the boy he was having a sexual experience and that is how the defendant’s semen came to be on the back of Jeremy’s T-shirt.

The judge noted that state witness Dr. Dennis Kelly testified that during a psychotic experience it would be highly unlikely that someone could have a sexual experience.

Additionally, Wyatt said, the most telling factor that indicates to him Langley knew right from wrong came from an examination just a few months after the defendant’s arrest.

The doctor, former Lake Charles psychiatrist Aretta Rathmell, noted that Langley’s recollection of what happened was related to detectives in a free, flowing and coherent way.

Additionally, Wyatt said, there has never been a period in Langley’s history where he was out of contact with reality, according to Rathmell.

Finally, Wyatt said there is documented molestation in the defendant’s history.

In conclusion, Wyatt said, “There was someone in that house that night who didn’t know right from wrong, but it wasn’t Ricky Langley.”

Wyatt made no reference to defense claims that Langley wasn’t killing Jeremy but was instead ridding himself of the delusions and hallucinations of his dead brother, Oscar Lee, who died in a car crash before Langley was conceived.

In her closing remarks Friday afternoon, defense attorney Anna Van Cleave asked Wyatt to consider what version of the slaying made more sense. She said Langley admitted to detectives he had killed Jeremy but didn’t know why.

She said it made more sense that Langley, with all of his psychiatric problems, believed he was killing Oscar Lee. She placed enlarged photographs of the defendant’s dead brother and the victim side by side so Wyatt could see the resemblance.

But Assistant District Attorney Rick Bryant argued that it wasn’t Oscar Lee whom Langley invited into the house that night and it wasn’t Oscar Lee whom Langley molested, strangled and put into the closet.

Bryant noted that Rathmell, after examining Langley, said she was concerned about his urge to kill children.

There was also testimony about a so-called dream diary the defendant kept in which he fantasized about luring children into the woods so he could molest them and then kill them.

Calling Langley “a ticking time bomb” on Feb. 7, 1992, Bryant said the defendant “devoured Jeremy to satisfy his sordid lust.” Bryant claimed that Langley targeted the boy for sexual purposes and then killed him. “There was no psychotic break; there was no Oscar Lee.”

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