There are a lot of defenses getting thrown around court on behalf of people who (ostensibly) involuntarily kill others. You may have heard of the Affluenza defense when Ethan Couch was sentenced to 10 years of therapy rather than jail after killing four people while driving drunk in 2013. His lawyers argued that he was too babied as a rich kid to understand consequences like the fact that when you drive drunk you might kill someone or yourself. Along those lines, in recent years there’s been an upswing in the Meth Defense: pleading insanity after killing people as a result of voluntarily ingesting a drug known to cause heinous bouts of hallucinations and paranoid psychosis.
A Case in Point
Shad Gary Dunbar, a 35-year-old resident in Rogue River, Oregon, considered using the Meth Defense before standing trial for shooting two newspaper carriers while high on meth (thankfully they didn’t die). In his drugged-out state, he thought the men had kidnapped his father, a classic sign of paranoid psychosis. After pleading plain-old-guilty to four counts of attempted murder, he wound up convicted and will be serving 10 years behind bars.
Why he didn’t try for the meth-induced insanity defense isn’t clear, but if he had gone that route, he may have wound up at a state psych hospital with the promise of an earlier release. Jeremy Markiewicz, the Chief Deputy District Attorney in the district where Dunbar was tried, told Mail Tribune that this meth defense is being used more and more in such circumstances.
“I’ve seen more diagnoses from defense psychologists and psychiatrists in the last couple of years,” he said, adding that he’s troubled by the idea that those committing violent acts while high on meth could get released too soon.
“If someone goes into the state hospital with meth psychosis and gets clean and shows no sign of suffering from a mental illness, they could be released in a very short period of time,” he said.
Ironically, Dunbar’s attorney Clayton Tullos agreed with Markiewicz, saying “That is a very valid concern on the part of prosecutors. Defendants could be released. They would be subject to monitoring, but they could be back in the community fairly quickly.”
Though defense attorneys have started citing meth use as a defense, they don’t stand up too well in court—unlike psychosis that results from schizophrenia, psychosis from meth intoxication is obviously self-inflicted. It can be argued, then, that any violent acts resulting from such intoxication are essentially voluntary—kind of like when you get loaded and and then kill four people while driving.
“Voluntary intoxication is not an excuse,” Tullos said.
Another Expert Weighs In
Psychiatrist Robert Julien, a practitioner from Lake Oswago, Oregon who specializes in psychopharmacology and has served as an expert witness for dozens of court cases, believes meth users stand a stronger chance of being acquitted if the psychosis is something that’s grown chronic as the result of using meth. Symptoms like hallucinations and delusions can hang on to some users well after they’ve stopped ingesting the drug.
“Meth is neuro-toxic and can damage and destroy the brain,” he says. “It can create long-term, irreversible brain changes. The changes can last up to five to six years in monkeys.” And, as Julien explains, some meth users never quite return to normal.
Is This a Black-and-White Issue?
If someone shoots you or your loved one in a meth-induced paranoia, it’s a travesty beyond words, so it seems like punishing such users to the full extent of the law would be the most ethical repercussion. At the same time, there’s an arguable difference between acts of violence committed when someone is in her or his right mind and those committed when someone is tweaking. The point grows even more grey when we’re talking about an addict who, despite attempts to cut the meth, can’t seem to stop. Yes, these people should be held accountable for their actions, but it only makes sense that they be tried and convicted for voluntary manslaughter rather than full-on murder, which happened in Dunbar’s case.
Meanwhile, over in Couch affluenza land, Ethan’s dad got busted last December for pretending to be a cop, was slapped with a year’s probation and is in danger of being locked away if he violates parol.
If that happens, who wants to take bets on the fact that he’ll come up with a wacky defense to beat it?
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