Life term for killer in ‘American Sniper’ trial

Eddie Ray Routh, the mentally disturbed US army veteran who killed Chris Kyle, the former marksman who inspired the movie American Sniper, has been sentenced to life in prison after a jury found him guilty of murder, rejecting his claims that he was legally insane at the time.

Routh and his lawyers had argued that he was not guilty by reason of insanity and that he belonged not in prison but at a state mental hospital. His two-week trial for the killings of Kyle and Kyle's friend Chad Littlefield in 2013 centered on Routh's state of mind. Jurors had to decide whether Routh's erratic behavior, his delusions about hybrid pig people and his heavy drug use were proof of insanity or evidence that he was troubled but criminally responsible.

With the death penalty off the table, the jury's decision that Routh was guilty of capital murder left him facing only one possible sentence, and the judge issued it minutes after the verdict was announced - life in prison without parole.

The judge announced the decision in a courtroom just three miles from a movie theatre that had been playing American Sniper since Routh's trial began on February 11th.

The film and the trial made for a strange intersection of pop culture and criminal law. The verdict came a couple of days after the movie lost the Academy Award for Best Picture to Birdman, and Kyle's widow, Taya Kyle, attended the Oscars ceremony in Los Angeles on Sunday, then the closing arguments here on Tuesday.

American Sniper was widely seen in the Stephenville area - Kyle had attended the local university, Tarleton State University, before he joined the navy - and it was likely that several jurors had seen the film before they were selected to be on the panel.

Routh's lawyers attempted to postpone the trial and move it out of Erath County, but the judge turned them down.

Routh (27) shot Kyle in the back on February 2nd, 2013, at a gun range 100 miles southwest of Dallas, after Routh's mother had asked Kyle to befriend her son.

After serving in the marines, Routh received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder and psychosis, and he had been suicidal and paranoid in the months before the shooting.

He used two of Kyle's handguns to shoot Kyle and Littlefield 13 times, killing a sniper who protected marines in Iraq with such deadly accuracy that insurgents nicknamed him the "Devil of Ramadi."

In several videotaped and recorded interviews and interactions with the police that were played for the jurors, Routh gave at times puzzling explanations about why he shot Kyle (38) and Littlefield (35). He spoke of fearing for his life and believing that they were going to kill him or take his soul.

He said that Littlefield was not shooting at the range and that "that's what got me riled up." He said he was offended that Kyle had not shaken his hand when they met, bothered by the smell of cologne in Kyle's truck and annoyed that the two men did not talk to him on the drive to the range.

"It smelled like sweet cologne," Routh told a reporter for The New Yorker magazine in 2013, in a phone call from jail that was recorded. "I was smelling love and hate. They were giving me some love and hate."

In finding Routh guilty and not legally insane, jurors appeared to have sided with the prosecutors, who portrayed Routh not as a sympathetic, troubled veteran but as a callous killer who stopped at Taco Bell shortly after fleeing the scene and who knew his actions were wrong, a crucial part of the legal test of insanity.

Mental health experts who examined Routh told the jurors that they believed that he had been involved in no combat in Iraq and that he had lied about putting the bodies of babies in a mass grave in Haiti as part of an earthquake-relief deployment.

Two experts who evaluated him for the prosecution testified that Routh was not insane and questioned whether he had exaggerated the trauma he experienced while in the marines to get disability benefits and tried to sound schizophrenic to get out of prison.

Routh had made bizarre statements that he believed people around him were half-pig, half-human, and that his co-workers at a cabinet shop were cannibals who wanted to cook and eat him. But one of the prosecution's experts who examined Routh, Randall Price, a Dallas forensic psychologist, testified that the Routh's statements about pig people may have come not from psychosis but from TV shows, including an episode from Seinfeld and a reality show called Boss Hog, two of Routh's favourite programs.

The prosecution's other expert, Dr Michael Arambula, a San Antonio forensic psychiatrist who is president of the Texas Medical Board, said that the delusions of schizophrenics often had structure and details, but that Routh's statements about cannibals lacked specifics.

"It doesn't have content," Dr Arambula said.

Hours after the killings, after Routh had been handcuffed and placed in the back seat of a police car, he told officers that he was paranoid and schizophrenic.

Such an admission, Price and Arambula said, indicated that Routh knew what he was doing and was trying to convince the authorities that he was insane, because people with severe mental illness are often reluctant to admit they have a problem.

"He was showing his hand," Dr Arambula said. "He was looking to get out of what he had done." Routh's lawyers defended his claim of schizophrenia. They called to the stand Dr Mitchell H Dunn, a forensic psychiatrist who spent more than six hours with Routh last year and who testified that the defendant had been in a state of psychosis at the time of the attack and had shot the two men because he believed that they were "pig assassins" sent to kill him.

Dunn and Routh's lawyers used Kyle's own words to strengthen their point. As Routh sat in the back seat of Kyle's truck on the drive to the range, Kyle sent a text message to Littlefield, who sat next to him in the passenger seat, writing, "This dude is straight-up nuts." Littlefield responded with a text of his own, asking Kyle to "watch my six," military parlance for "watch my back." Dr Dunn described the texts as "compelling evidence."

Doctors at a Dallas veterans' hospital who treated Routh before the shooting had said Routh had PTSD, but the three experts who evaluated him for the defence and the prosecution testified that they did not think that Routh had it.

A prosecutor described Routh's PTSD as "kind of a myth that's come up in this case."

Routh, who worked as a prison guard and a weapons-maintenance specialist known as an armourer while in the marines, told the experts who examined him that he had spent time in Iraq at Joint Base Balad, which he described as "plush" because it had a movie theater and other amenities.

For the humanitarian mission in Haiti, he was aboard a ship most of the time, and none of the three experts said they believed Routh's claims that he had seen or come into contact with the bodies of dead babies there.

NYT