by Neil Gaiman
If we’re arrested for a crime, the law asks, did we act knowingly and intentionally to break a law? If we didn’t, then we’re not guilty.
There are, in fact, two ways in which sanity arises in a criminal court. One is when the defendant is so out of it that he can’t participate in his own trial. That U.S. Constitution thing: the right to confront your accusers.
But this isn’t what most people familiar with Boston Legal or Perry Mason think of as the insanity defense and, as Bob Ringling had confirmed, it wasn’t an issue in State v. Kobel.
More common is when defense lawyers invoke various offshoots of M’Naughten rule, which holds that if the defendant lacked the capacity to know he was doing something wrong when he committed the crime, he can’t be found guilty. This isn’t to say he’s going scot-free; he’ll get locked up in a mental ward until it’s determined that he’s no longer dangerous.
This was Bob Ringling’s claim regarding Martin Kobel.
But Glenn Hollow exhaled a perplexed laugh. “He wasn’t insane. He was a practicing therapist with an obsession over a pretty woman who was ignoring him. Special circumstances. I want guilty, I want the needle. That’s it.”
Ringling said to Rollins, “Insanity. You sentence him to indefinite incarceration in Butler, Judge. We won’t contest it. No trial. Everybody wins.”
Hollow said, “Except the other people he kills when they let him out in five years.”
“Ah, you just want a feather in your cap for when you run for AG. He’s a media bad boy.”
“I want justice,” Hollow said, supposing he was sounding pretentious. And not caring one whit. Nor admitting that, yeah, he did want the feather, too.
“What’s the evidence for the looney tunes?” the judge asked. He had a very different persona when he was in chambers compared with when he was in the courtroom, and presumably different yet at Etta’s Diner, eating corned beef.
“He absolutely believes he didn’t do anything wrong. He was saving the children in Annabelle’s class. I’ve been over this with him a dozen times. He believes it.”
“Believes what exactly?” the judge asked.
“That she was possessed. By something like a ghost. I’ve looked it up. Some cult thing on the Internet. Some spirit or something makes you lose control, lose your temper and beat the crap out of your wife or kids. Even makes you kill people. It’s called a neme.” He spelled it.
“Neme.”
Hollow said, “I’ve looked it up too, Judge. You can look it up. We all can look it up. Which is just what Kobel did. To lay the groundwork for claiming insanity. He killed a hot young woman who rejected him. And now he’s pretending he believes in ’em to look like he’s nuts.”
“If that’s the case,” Ringling said gravely, “then he’s been planning ever since he was a teenager to kill a woman he met two weeks ago.”
“What’s that?”
“His parents died in a car crash when he was in high school. He had a break with reality, the doctors called it. Diagnosed as a borderline personality.”
“Like my cousin,” the judge said. “She’s awkward. The wife and I never invite her over, if we can avoid it.”
“Kobel got involuntary commitment for eight months back then, talking about these creatures that possessed the driver who killed his family. Same thing as now.”
“But he had to go to shrink school,” the judge pointed out. “He graduated. That’s not crazy in my book.”
Hollow leaped in with, “Exactly. He has a master’s in psychology. One in social work. Good grades. Sees patients. And he’s written books. For God’s sake.”
“One of which I happen to have with me and which I will be introducing into evidence. Thank you, Glenn, for bringing it up.” The defense lawyer opened his briefcase and dropped a 10-pound stack of 8½-by-11 sheets on the judge’s desk. “Self-published, by the way. And written by hand.”
Hollow looked it over. He had good eyes but it was impossible to read any of the text except the title because it was in such tiny handwriting. There had to be a thousand words per page, in elegant, obsessive script.
Biblical Evidence of Malevolent
Emotional ENERGY Incorporated into Psyches
By Martin Kobel
© All rights reserved
“All rights reserved?” Hollow snorted. “Who’s going to plagiarize this crap? And what’s with the capitalization?”
“Glenn, this is one of about thirty volumes. He’s been writing these things for twenty years. And it’s the smallest one.”
The prosecutor repeated, “He’s faking.”
But the judge was skeptical. “Going back all those years?”
“Okay, he’s quirky. But this man is dangerous. Two of his patients killed themselves under circumstances that make it seem like he suggested they do it. Another one’s serving five years because he attacked Kobel in his office. He claimed the doctor provoked him. And Kobel broke into a funeral home six years ago and was caught fucking around with the corpses.”
“What?”
“Not that way. He was dissecting them. Looking for evidence of these things, these nemes.”
Ringling said happily, “There’s another book he wrote on the autopsy. Eighteen hundred pages. Illustrated.”
“It wasn’t an autopsy, Bob. It was breaking into a funeral home and fucking around with corpses.” Hollow was getting angry. But maybe it’s just a neme, he thought cynically. “He goes to conferences.”
“Paranormal conferences. Wacko conferences. Full of wackos just like him.”
“Jesus Christ, Bob. The people who cop insanity pleas’re paranoid schizos. They don’t bathe, they take Haldol and lithium, they’re delusional. They don’t go to fucking Starbucks and ask for an extra shot of syrup.”
Hollow had used the f word more times today than in the past year.
Ringling said, “They kill people because they’re possessed by ghosts. That’s not sane. End of story.”
The judge lifted his hand. “You gentlemen know that when the earth was young, Africa and South America were right next to each other. I mean, fifty feet away. Think about that. And here you are, same thing. You’re real close, I can tell. You can work it out. Come together. There’s a song about that. It’s in your interest. If we go to trial, you two’re doing all the work. All I’m gonna be doing is saying ‘sustained’ and ‘overruled.’”
“Bob, he killed that girl, a schoolteacher. In cold blood. I want him away forever. He’s a danger and he’s sick…What I can do, but only this, I’ll go with life. Drop special circumstances. But no parole.”
The judge looked expectantly toward Bob Ringling. “That’s something.”
“I knew it’d come up,” Ringling said. “I asked my client about it. He says he didn’t do anything wrong and he has faith in the system. He’s convinced there’re these things floating around and they glom onto you and make you do bad stuff. No, we’re going for insanity.”
Hollow grimaced. “You want to play it that way, you get your expert and I’ll get mine.”
The judge grumbled. “Pick a date, gentlemen. We’re going to trial. And, for Christ sake, somebody tell me, what the hell is a neme?”
THE PEOPLE OF THE State of North Carolina v. Kobel began on a Wednesday in July.
Glenn Hollow kicked it off with a string of witnesses and police reports regarding the forensic evidence, which was irrefutable. Bob Ringling let most of it go and just got a few errant bits of trace evidence removed, which Hollow didn’t care about anyway.
Another of Hollow’s witnesses was a clerk from Starbucks in Raleigh, who testified about the business card exchange. (Hollow noted the troubled looks on the faces of several jurors and people in the gallery, leaving them wondering, he supposed, about the wisdom of affairs and other indiscreet behavior in places with observant baristas.)
Other witnesses testified about behavior consistent with stalking, including several who’d seen Kobel in Wetherby on the days before the mur
der. Several had seen his car parked outside the school where Annabelle Young taught. If there’s any way to put your location on record, it’s to be a middle-aged man parked outside a middle school. Eight concerned citizens gave the police his tag number.
The busboy at Etta’s Diner gave some very helpful testimony with the help of a Spanish translator.
As for Kobel himself, sitting at the defense table, his hair was askew and his suit didn’t fit right. He frantically filled notebook after notebook with writing like ant tracks.
Son of a bitch, thought Hollow. It was pure performance, orchestrated by Bob Ringling, Esq., of course, with Martin Kobel in the role of schizophrenic. Hollow had seen the police interview video. On screen the defendant had been well scrubbed, well spoken, and no twitchier than Hollow’s ten-year-old Lab, known to take naps in the middle of tornados.
Any other case, the trial would’ve been over with on the second day—with a verdict for the People, followed by a lengthy appeal and an uncomfortable few minutes while the executioner figured out which was the better vein, right arm or left.
But there was more, of course. Where the real battle would be fought.
Ringling’s expert psychiatrist testified that the defendant was, in his opinion, legally insane and unable to tell the difference between right and wrong. Kobel honestly believed that Annabelle Young was a threat to students and her son because she was infested by a neme, some spirit or force that he truly believed existed.
“He’s paranoid, delusional. His reality is very, very different from ours,” was the expert’s conclusion.
The shrink’s credentials were good, and since that was about the only way to attack him, Hollow let him go.
“Your Honor,” Ringling next said. “I move to introduce defense exhibits numbers one through twenty-eight.”
And wheeled up to the bench—literally, in carts—Kobel’s notebooks and self-published treatises on nemes, more than anybody could possibly be interested in.
A second expert for the defense testified about these writings. “These are typical of a delusional mind.” Everything Kobel had written was typical of a paranoid and delusional individual who had lost touch with reality. He stated that there was no scientific basis for the concept of neme. “It’s like voodoo, it’s like vampires, werewolves.”
Ringling tried to seal the deal by having the doctor read a portion from one of these “scientific treatises,” a page of utterly incomprehensible nonsense. Judge Rollins, on the edge of sleep, cut him off. “We get the idea, Counselor. Enough.”
On cross-examination, Hollow couldn’t do much to deflate this testimony. The best he could do was: “Doctor, do you read the Harry Potter books?”
“Well, as a matter of fact, yes, I have.”
“The fourth was my favorite. What was yours?”
“Umm, I don’t know really.”
“Is it possible,” the prosecutor asked the witness, “that those writings of Mr. Kobel are merely attempts at writing a novel? Some big fantasy book.”
“I…I can’t imagine it.”
“But it’s possible, isn’t it?”
“I suppose. But I’ll tell you, he’ll never sell the movie rights.”
Amid the laughter, the judge dismissed the witness.
There was testimony about the bizarre autopsy, which Hollow didn’t bother to refute.
Bob Ringling also introduced two of Kobel’s patients, who testified that they had been so troubled by his obsessive talk about these ghosts or spirits inhabiting their bodies that they quit seeing him.
And then Ringling had Kobel himself take the stand, dressed in the part of a madman in his premeditatedly wrinkled and dirty clothes, chewing his lip, looking twitchy and weird.
This idea—insane in its own right—was a huge risk, because on cross-examination Hollow would ask the man point-blank if he’d killed Annabelle Young. Since he’d confessed once, he would have to confess again—or Hollow would read the sentence from his statement. Either way the jury would actually hear the man admit to the crime.
But Ringling met the problem head-on. His first question: “Mr. Kobel, did you kill Annabelle Young?”
“Oh, yes, of course I did.” He sounded surprised.
A gasp filled the courtroom.
“And why did you do that, Mr. Kobel.”
“For the sake of the children.”
“How do you mean that?”
“She was a teacher, you know. Oh, God! Every year, thirty or forty students, impressionable young people, would come under her influence. She was going to poison their minds. She might even hurt them, abuse them, spread hatred.” He closed his eyes and shivered.
And the Academy Award for best performance on the part of a crazed murder suspect goes to…
“Now, tell me, Mr. Kobel, why did you think she would hurt the children?”
“Oh, she’d come under the influence of a neme.”
“That’s what we heard a little about earlier, right? In your writings?”
“Yes, in my writings.”
“Could you tell us, briefly, what a neme is?”
“You could call it an energy force. Malevolent energy. It attaches to your mind and it won’t let go. It’s terrible. It causes you to commit crimes, abuse people, fall into rages. A lot of temper tantrums and road rage are caused by nemes. They’re all over the place. Millions of them.”
“And you were convinced she was possessed?”
“It’s not possession,” Kobel said adamantly. “That’s a theological concept. Nemes are purely scientific. Like viruses.”
“You think they’re as real as viruses?”
“They are! You have to believe me! They are!”
“And Ms. Young was being influenced by nemes.”
“One, just one.”
“And was going to hurt her students.”
“And her son. Oh, yes, I could see it. I have this ability to see nemes. I had to save the children.”
“You weren’t stalking her because you were attracted to her?”
Kobel’s voice cracked. “No, no. Nothing like that. I wanted to get her into counseling. I could have saved her. But she was too far gone. The last thing I wanted to do was kill her. But it was a blessing. It really was. I had to.” Tears glistened.
Oh, brother…
“Prosecution’s witness.”
Hollow did the best he could. He decided not to ask about Annabelle Young. Kobel’s murdering her was no longer the issue in this case. The whole question was Kobel’s state of mind. Hollow got the defendant to admit that he’d been in a mental hospital only once, as a teenager, and hadn’t seen a mental health professional since then. He’d taken no antipsychotic drugs. “They take my edge off. You have to be sharp when you’re fighting nemes.”
“Just answer the question, please.”
Hollow then produced Kobel’s tax returns for the past three years.
When Ringling objected, Hollow said to Judge Rollins, “Your Honor, a man who files a tax return is of sound mind.”
“That’s debatable,” said the ultraconservative judge, drawing laughter from the courtroom.
Oh, to be on the bench, thought Glenn Hollow. And maybe after a few years’ stint as the attorney general I will be.
Rollins said, “I’ll let ’em in.”
“These are your returns, aren’t they, sir?”
“I guess. Yes.”
“They indicate you made a fair amount of money at your practice. About forty thousand dollars a year.”
“Maybe. I suppose so.”
“So despite those other two patients who testified earlier, you must have a much larger number of patients you treat regularly and who are satisfied with your services.”
Kobel looked him in the eyes. “There’re a lot of nemes out there. Somebody’s gotta fight ’em.”
Hollow sighed. “No further questions, Your Honor.”
The prosecutor then called his own expert, a psychiatrist who’d examined Kob
el. The testimony was that, though quirky, he was not legally insane. He was well aware of what he was doing, that he was committing a crime when he killed the victim.
Ringling asked a few questions, but didn’t belabor the cross-examination.
Toward the end of the day, during a short break, Glenn Hollow sneaked a look at the jury box; he’d been a prosecutor and a trial lawyer for a long time and was an expert not only at the law but at reading juries.
And, goddamn it, they were reacting just the way Bob Ringling wanted them to. Hollow could tell they hated and feared Martin Kobel, but because he was such a monster and the things he was saying were so bizarre, he couldn’t be held to the jury’s standards of ethics and behavior. Oh, Ringling had been smart. He wasn’t playing his client as a victim, he wasn’t playing him as somebody who’d been abused or suffered a traumatic childhood (he barely referred to the deaths of Kobel’s parents and brother).
No, he was showing that this thing at the defense table was not even human.
Like his expert said, “Mr. Kobel’s reality is not our reality.”
Hollow stretched his skinny legs out in front of him and watched the tassels on his loafers lean to the side. I’m going to lose this case, he reflected. I’m going to lose it. And that son of a bitch’ll be out in five or six years, looking for other women to stalk.
He was in despair.
Nemes…shit.
Then the judge turned away from his clerk and said, “Mr. Hollow? Shall we continue with your rebuttal of Mr. Ringling’s affirmative defense?”
It was then that a thought occurred to the prosecutor. He considered it for a moment and gasped at where the idea led.
“Mr. Hollow?”
“Your Honor, if possible, could we recess until tomorrow? The prosecution would appreciate the time.”
Judge Rollins debated. He looked at his watch. “All right. We’ll recess until nine A.M. tomorrow.”
Glenn Hollow thanked the judge and told his young associates to gather up the papers and take them back to the office. The prosecutor rose and headed out the door. But he didn’t start sprinting until he was well out of the courthouse; he believed that you never let jurors see anything but your dignified self.
