Personally Speaking: Christopher Sharikas (Part Two)
By Lisa Dailey
(Nov. 16, 2017) In my first blog post about Christopher Sharikas, I described his history of mental illness and his crime. In this post I’ll describe how people with serious mental illness are treated by the court system.
The fact is that a person who commits a crime but is suffering from a serious mental illness may have less culpability than another person who does the same thing.
There are three times when the courts are supposed to consider the role of mental illness during a criminal case. Competency to stand trial is the first, the issue of criminal responsibility is the next, and sentencing is the last. The case of Christopher Sharikas is a glaring example of how often such safeguards fail, and what happens when the role of serious mental illness in a crime is ignored by the courts.
Shortly after his arrest, it was clear that Christopher was “extremely psychotic.” He was sent to the state hospital for restoration of competency. But restoration should not be confused with treatment, because the goal of restoration is to get the defendant just competent enough to proceed with the case against him. It is quite clear from his sentencing hearing that Christopher Sharikas was still delusional at that time, meaning the courts had determined he was ready to face a trial and make decisions about a plea agreement when he was still completely out of touch with reality. According to the Arlington circuit courts, he was competent enough. The fact that he was still delusional at sentencing cost Sharikas dearly, as his demeanor angered the judge and resulted in the harshest possible sentence.
Once deemed competent, Christopher’s defense could have raised his mental state at the time of the crime by pleading not guilty by reason of insanity under Virginia law. Yet the defense attorney assigned to Sharikas in this case never did this, recommending a guilty plea without securing an agreement for a sentence with the prosecutor. Apparently acknowledging his unpreparedness, he advised his client’s parents to hire a more experienced criminal attorney. Perhaps not surprisingly, this attorney was later disbarred for misconduct.
At sentencing Christopher’s paranoid schizophrenia had the exact opposite effect that it was supposed to have under the law. Evidence of mental illness is allowed at sentencing to persuade the judge or jury to be more lenient if the illness was a factor in why the defendant committed a crime. Yet studies show that even in death penalty cases, mental illness often has the opposite effect. This may be due to fear of those with mental illness and the stigma attached to such diagnoses.
Statements by Commonwealth’s attorney Theo Stamos reveal that this is precisely how the evidence of Sharikas’s diagnosis was used: to persuade the judge that he should receive a harsher sentence because his illness made him more dangerous. Addressing the judge, Stamos argued for a longer sentence than recommended by the guidelines to “keep us safe.”
“He is the person in the community that everyone worries about when they’re driving alone,” Stamos told the judge. “He is the kind of person who makes us feel unsafe.”
In other words, Stamos asked the judge to send a sixteen year-old with untreated paranoid schizophrenia to prison for longer than suggested by the sentencing guidelines because his illness made him scary and the public needed to be protected from him, not because the crime was more serious or because he was more culpable.
And based on the judge’s statement at sentencing, it is clear that the judge accepted this argument and punished Christopher more harshly because of his illness.
“It’s a gamble to say that a child – he’s a child – could be cured, treated, made safe,” Judge Paul Sheridan declared.
If one takes the judge’s statement at face value, justice wasn’t blind, it was just carelessly myopic.
What is excruciatingly clear from this case is that Virginia’s methods for taking mental illness into consideration during criminal cases fails, and in fact does the opposite of what it is intended to do. Competency restoration should actually prevent psychotic individuals from facing trial before they can act in their own best interests. Defense attorneys should be adequately trained to raise mental illness as a defense when it is appropriate. Finally, serious mental illness should not be used by prosecutors and judges as a reason to punish more severely when it is meant to do the opposite.
The statements of Theo Stamos and Judge Paul Sheridan speak for themselves – and they speak volumes.
