Empty Promises

the man who had threatened her with the gun.
    California Superior Court Judge Arthur E. Broaddus took the witness stand to read lengthy portions of a transcript of an interview he had with both Braun and Maine as they were questioned following their arrests in Jamestown.
    Broaddus, at that time the Tuolumne County district attorney, read the damaging statements concerning the savage attacks on Tim Luce and Susan Bartolomei. Attorney Hale then asked Judge Broaddus to read sections of the transcript where Maine said he felt sorry for the victims and that he was afraid of Braun, who usually had a pistol in his possession or nearby.
    Further testimony during the penalty phase brought out the shocking magnitude of the defendants’ antisocial feelings. A former cell mate of Maine’s in Ukiah, California, told of being forced to commit sodomy by the defendant, who threatened him with a straight-edged razor. Braun hadn’t been the ideal cell mate either. A twenty-one-year-old inmate of the Snohomish County jail testified that Braun had threatened him while the two shared a cell. In the ensuing scuffle, the witness was injured and had to be treated at an Everett hospital.
    Tension in the courtroom mounted during the final phase of the trial. Twice Leonard Maine told Judge McCrea that he was too ill to continue and court had to be recessed while he was examined by a county physician, who found nothing seriously wrong with him. Braun’s attorney asserted that his client wasn’t responsible for his acts because of mental irresponsibility, although such a plea had already been ruled out in this trial. He detailed the defendant’s wretched childhood and told the jury that Braun’s mother had died after having an illegal abortion; Braun’s father, an alcoholic, according to the defendant, routinely locked Braun and his sister in his truck and left them for hours while he visited taverns.
    A Seattle clinical psychologist, Dr. Ralph Hirschstein, who interviewed Braun twice and conducted psychiatric tests, told the jury that he considered the defendant a “pseudo-psychopathic schizophrenic”—a “bright man” who had been out of contact with reality during August of 1967.
    Virtually the same opinion was given by Paul Handrich, a clinical psychiatrist from Ukiah, California. Handrich defined a psychopath as a person who has no conscience and a schizophrenic as a person who has a conscience but does not know how to use it. “Schizophrenia is characterized by disturbance of emotions, marked ambivalence, and loose associations of thought. This man is genuinely perplexed.” Braun’s sister recalled the pathetic and trauma-fraught childhood they had endured. Alternately neglected and abused by a punishing father, she said her brother had once been forced to shoot his own dog because the animal had killed chickens. Hale’s plea for Leonard Maine also hit hard at the mental irresponsibility of his client. He called Maine’s parents and wife, who had been in the courtroom since the beginning of the trial. They described the diminutive defendant as a man continually beset by feelings of inferiority because of his borderline intelligence.
    “He was a good boy,” Maine’s mother recalled, “who had a record of good behavior in school. His two main interests were cars and horses. It hurt him that he couldn’t keep up with the other children in school.” She told of Maine’s being held back in the third grade and of how he finally dropped out of school just before his ninth grade year was over because the struggle to keep up had been too much.
    Dr. Fariborz Amini, a California psychiatrist, testified regarding his examination of Maine. He said that the defendant viewed himself more “as a victim … than as a participant in the crimes. Maine has an inadequate personality with some characteristics of passive dependency, accentuated by below-normal intelligence.” He said his examination of Maine showed that the defendant’s IQ was somewhere between 80 and 90. “In August of 1987,” Dr. Amini said, “Mr. Maine was under severe stress, which made him unable to deliberate. Given Maine’s need to be dependent on others, he is not able to act on his own when under heavy emotional stress.” Cross-examined by Deputy Prosecutor Metcalf, Dr. Amini was asked if Maine knew the difference between right and wrong during the events of August 1967. “If you’re asking me if he had absolute knowledge, no. If he had an awareness,