PLATTSBURGH — Gustavo Segundo-Clark’s legal professional is considering a defense of “a loss of crook duty by intellectual sickness” for his consumer. Joseph Mucia of Niles, Bracy, and Murcia these days filed a notice of rationale to proffer psychiatric evidence beneath criminal technique law 250.10, which defines how this type of protection — commonly referred to as “no longer guilty via the purpose of madness.” Segundo-Clark, 25, is accused of stabbing to loss of life his grandmother Ginger Clark with a kitchen knife in her home at 111 Rooney Road in Beekmantown last November.
A member of the family located her on the morning of Thanksgiving, Nov. 22; Segundo-Clark was arrested close to Schenectady that equal day, pulled over using Clark’s 2010 Subaru Forrester, the Clinton County District Attorney’s Office stated earlier. He becomes tracked thru the use of his grandmother’s credit card, which he used to shop for gas for the automobile and meals at a McDonald’s and Burger King, in step with the DA’s Office.
Segundo-Clark, incarcerated in Clinton County Jail seeing that Nov. 23, is recognized with schizophrenia, Murcia said.
“My consumer has a history of drug abuse and drug use,” he delivered, “and if you mix drug use with schizophrenia, terrible things can show up.”
MENTAL HEALTH REPORTS
In Clinton County Court on March 14, District Attorney Andrew Wylie asked that every one Segundo-Clark’s mental-fitness treatment records be launched to his workplace so a psychiatric professional could examine them.
“They simply have the right to try this,” Murcia said Friday. At that equal appearance, he filed his word of purpose.
Murcia, appointed utilizing the court to symbolize Segundo-Clark, has for the reason that supplied facts to the DA’s Office from University of Vermont Health Network, Alice Hyde Medical Center in Malone; UVHN, Champlain Valley Physician’s Hospital in Plattsburgh; Claxton-Hepburn Medical Center in Ogdensburg; and Behavioral Health Services North in Plattsburgh.
“The mental-fitness reports and the medical doctors’ notes talk for themselves,” he said. According to Criminal Procedure Law 250.10, “the term ‘psychiatric evidence’ manner proof of mental disease or illness to be supplied with the aid of the defendant about,” among different definitions, “the affirmative protection of lack of criminal obligation through the motive of mental sickness or defect.”
RECORDS FROM PRISON
In court docket Thursday, Clinton County Judge William Favreau, in brief, heard from both Wylie and Murcia approximately the motions made weeks earlier. Since then, Wylie stated, he has been instructed with the aid of the New York State Office of Mental Health that, with a judicial subpoena, his offices should receive Segundo-Clark’s intellectual-health facts his time inside the nation correctional gadget.
Murcia did no longer object, and Favreau agreed to that. Segundo-Clark, convicted of second-diploma attempted housebreaking, was incarcerated at Great Meadow Correctional Facility in Washington County from July 25, 2017, till his conditional launch to parole on Sept. 11, 2018. Had he served his full term, he might have been let loose on Christmas Day remaining 12 months.
He became living along with his grandmother in Beekmantown whilst the stabbing passed off. Segundo-Clark is charged with: 2nd-diploma homicide; first-degree attack; 0.33-degree and fourth-diploma grand larceny, in connection with the theft of the auto; a 2nd rely on fourth-degree grand larceny in connection with a theft from Clark of a credit score card; third-degree ownership of a weapon, a felony; fourth-degree ownership of a weapon, a misdemeanor; and tampering with physical proof, a misdemeanor. That closing charge is from washing a kitchen knife that the notion could be used as proof, consistent with the indictment.
SUPPRESSION HEARINGS
Favreau additionally agreed to allow the discharge of Clark’s stolen 2010 Subaru Forrester to her property after State Police have been completed processing it. The defense had no objection. Segundo-Clark, who sat quietly through the proceeding, turned into the lower back to prison to live until his subsequent court appearance. That is scheduled for 10:30 a.M. Friday, April 5, Murcia stated, with suppression hearings to take location. “That’s to peer if any statements by using the defendant are admissible in the courtroom,” he said.
It’s an ordinary step in the technique, Murcia said. Court documents, inclusive of a declaration from State Police Investigator Joseph Krywalski, say Segundo-Clark at the beginning denied understanding a Ginger Clark. After he was instructed, she was hospitalized. He persisted; the Beekmantown man admitted they have been “concerned in a physical dispute earlier in the week, and then he left in her car.”
Segundo-Clark, who pleaded not guilty to all costs while arraigned in January, did now not say he killed his grandmother, consistent with the statements. “He said that after the altercation,” Krywalski stated, “Ginger rolled herself up in the carpet,” Murcia stated he thinks a tribulation date might be set at subsequent Friday’s courtroom look.
