A murder trial is supposed to end in one of two places. The jury convicts, or it does not. In practice the ground between those verdicts has side turnings that lawmakers and judges have built over two centuries, and the juries and judges below were sent down several of them. Some were asked to return a verdict that would have made a prisoner a patient. Some were told that an abnormality of the mind could turn murder into manslaughter. Some were asked nothing of the kind, and the verdict that mattered was delivered years later by an appeal court. In nine cases, in four countries, the question was the same: what do we call a person who did this, and who may have been ill when he did it?
The answers differ with the system. Illinois and Georgia let a court say that a defendant was guilty but mentally ill, a finding that leaves the conviction and the sentence in place and adds a duty to treat. England, for most of the twentieth century, had the special verdict of guilty but insane, and later the partial defense of diminished responsibility, which converts murder into manslaughter and hands the sentencing judge a choice between prison and a hospital. The Bahamas follows the English model. Brazil asks a psychiatrist to classify the defendant as imputable, semi-imputable or not imputable at all. None of these verdicts denies that the defendant did what he did. All of them are about what comes next.
Andrew Urdiales, a former Marine, was convicted of murdering eight women in two states. His first trial was in Cook County, Illinois, for the murders of Laura Uylaki and Lynn Huber. He claimed insanity and mental illness there, and the jury rejected both and convicted him of both murders. The Illinois Supreme Court dates the sentence of death to September 3, 2002. In January 2003 Governor George Ryan, who cleared Illinois’s death row, commuted that sentence to natural life without parole.
The second Illinois case, in Livingston County, is the one that belongs here. Urdiales was charged with the murder of Cassandra Corum, 21. On April 23, 2004, he offered to plead guilty but mentally ill. The state disputed that he was mentally ill at all. On May 4 he waived a jury on guilt, and the trial judge agreed to hear the plea and an insanity defense together. The question for the court was whether to accept a middle verdict that Urdiales himself was asking for.
Five experts testified, and they did not agree. Dr. Terry Killian, a psychiatrist for the defense, concluded that Urdiales was sane but mentally ill, listing post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar mood disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, a dissociative disorder, Tourette’s syndrome and a personality disorder, and treating dissociation as the most significant. Dr. Daniel Cuneo, a psychologist, also called him mentally ill but not insane, and put post-traumatic stress first. Dr. James Merikangas, a psychiatrist, went further: he thought Urdiales insane, because of organic brain disease visible, in his view, on brain scans, and he disagreed with the other two about the weight of post-traumatic stress and dissociation. Two more experts who did not testify, Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis and Dr. Charles Opsahl, had written reports describing psychosis and neuropsychological impairment.
The state’s witnesses saw something else. Dr. Janet Willer, the Veterans Administration psychologist who had met him for more than 100 sessions, diagnosed mild depression and avoidant personality disorder. Dr. Park Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist, concluded that he was sane and not mentally ill in the legal sense, and attributed his poor judgment to anger rather than illness.
On May 10, 2004, the judge rejected the plea of guilty but mentally ill, rejected the insanity defense and convicted him of first-degree murder. The reasons were practical. The defense experts disagreed about the principal diagnosis. None of them explained how Urdiales had functioned as a Marine and as a security guard. And the crime showed planning. "The defendant went prepared and in fact successfully carried out this murder as well as seven others," the judge said. He preferred Dietz’s account, and noted that Urdiales had read a book by Dr. Lewis, one of the experts whose report supported the defense.
A sentencing jury then heard aggravation and mitigation. Among the defense witnesses was a former warden of Menard Correctional Center, who testified that Urdiales had adjusted very well to prison, with two disciplinary tickets in seven years. The jury returned death. The appeal went straight to the Illinois Supreme Court, which filed its opinion on February 16, 2007, and modified it on May 29 of that year. Urdiales had raised 11 issues, including the rejection of his plea of guilty but mentally ill and the weight of the evidence on insanity. The court affirmed. When Illinois abolished capital punishment in March 2011, the Livingston County sentence became life without parole.
California tried him last. An Orange County jury convicted him on May 23, 2018, of the first-degree murders of Robbin Brandley, Julie McGhee, Mary Ann Wells, Tammie Erwin and Denise Maney, with the multiple-murder and lying-in-wait special circumstances ruled true. The penalty phase opened on May 29, and on June 13 the same jury recommended death for each of the five murders. Judge Gregg Prickett imposed the sentences on October 5, 2018. Urdiales reached California’s death row a week later. On November 2 he was discovered unresponsive in a single cell in San Quentin’s Adjustment Center, and he was pronounced dead early the next morning. The Associated Press reported that the death was being treated as a suspected suicide. No execution took place.
His mental state was disputed at every trial, and every fact-finder rejected the claim that it reduced his responsibility. A Cook County jury, a Livingston County judge and an Orange County jury each declined to treat mental illness, brain damage or dissociation as removing or lessening his guilt, while the experts who examined him never settled on one diagnosis. What the Livingston County ruling shows is how little a defendant gains by asking for the middle verdict. Guilty but mentally ill is a verdict a court may decline to enter when it does not believe the illness is real, and the judge’s reasoning, that experts who cannot agree and a defendant who functioned and planned do not make a case, would sound familiar in the other courtrooms below.
In Georgia the same middle verdict was the entire defense. Reinaldo Javier Rivera, a former Navy officer living in North Augusta, South Carolina, went on trial in Richmond County Superior Court on January 5, 2004, for the murder of Marni Glista, a 21-year-old Army sergeant stationed at Fort Gordon. Judge Pickett presided. Peter Johnson and Jacque Hawk, his lawyers, planned from the start to ask the jury for a verdict of guilty but mentally ill, the Associated Press reported.
Rivera testified. "We’re trying to get everyone to accept the idea that I have a mental illness," he told the jury, according to the Associated Press. "We’ve got to figure out why I do the things that I do." Johnson argued that medical evidence showed brain damage had left Rivera unable to choose between right and wrong, and that doctors could study him in the hope of finding a cure and a way to prevent such crimes. The trial court did not allow expert testimony linking frontal lobe dysfunction to criminal behavior, ruling that the theory could not be scientifically verified. A defense neurologist testified that Rivera was not mentally ill and was of above-average or superior intelligence. District Attorney Craig told the jury that he was not mentally ill in the legal sense of being unable to tell right from wrong; he called him a psychopath.
On Friday, January 23, 2004, the jury rejected the defense and convicted Rivera of malice murder and 13 other counts, 14 in all. Three days later it voted for death. The sentencing phase was complicated by Rivera himself. According to the Supreme Court of Georgia, he would not allow two family members to testify in mitigation, and after the guilty verdicts he raised with the judge the ideas of presenting no mitigation at all, staying away from the sentencing hearing, acting as his own co-counsel and firing his lawyers. The defense still called six witnesses to ask for a life sentence. One was his sister, who said she could not believe that the brother she knew could have done such things. "There’s no way he’s evil; he has to be sick," she said. In closing, the prosecutor asked the jurors, "Whose daughter will it be the next time?"
The Supreme Court of Georgia affirmed the judgment on June 25, 2007, and denied reconsideration on July 27. It held that the evidence was sufficient on every count, that the exclusion of the frontal lobe testimony had not been preserved for appeal and in any case rested on the correct test for scientific evidence, and that his statements to police were voluntary. It noted one flaw: the jury had stated the third aggravating circumstance in the alternative, so the jurors might not have agreed on a single basis for it. That did not require reversal, because the other two aggravating circumstances stood. State habeas relief was denied on March 31, 2011. A federal judgment on September 13, 2024, denied habeas relief, an appeal was docketed in the Eleventh Circuit on February 26, 2025, and the Georgia Department of Corrections lists him as under a death sentence as of June 30, 2026.
Rivera is legally a one-victim murderer. He confessed to police to killing four young women in Georgia and South Carolina, and the Associated Press reported in 2004 that he was charged in the deaths of Tabitha Bosdell in Georgia and Melissa Dingess and Tiffaney Wilson in Aiken County, South Carolina. The jury convicted him on counts concerning Bosdell, but the Richmond County indictment did not charge her murder. After the verdict the district attorney said he would likely pursue murder charges in Columbia County. No Columbia County trial and no outcome of the South Carolina charges has been reported. The defense that failed in Richmond County had asked a jury to see a sick man where prosecutors saw a psychopath, and the neurologist the defense called helped the other side by calling him sane.
Gerald Patrick Lewis was arrested in Mobile County, Alabama, in April 1998 for the murder of Kathleen Bracken. Questioned by Mobile police, he said he had information about the murder of Misty McGugin in neighboring Baldwin County, and then confessed to killing her. Over the following months he told investigators in Alabama and Georgia about earlier killings, among them that of Peggy Lynn Grimes, 22, who was eight or nine months pregnant in the summer of 1993.
A Baldwin County jury convicted him of capital murder in the McGugin case in February 2000 and he was sentenced to death. He was convicted of Bracken’s murder and received life without parole. In Georgia he pleaded guilty on November 19, 2001, to malice murder and feticide in the Grimes case and to the other counts of the Douglas County indictment. A court-appointed psychologist who had met him twice reported no acute mental disorder and called him competent to plead. Earlier psychologists had reached the same conclusion. A Douglas County jury sentenced him to death in March 2003.
Lewis’s lawyers did present mental illness at the sentencing trial, as mitigation. He was taking several psychiatric medications, and his lawyers worried that jurors would read drowsiness as indifference or a lack of remorse; the judge told the jury it could take the medication into account. On the other side, several psychologists had concluded that Lewis was faking or exaggerating his symptoms, and records showed he had tried to feign psychiatric disturbance.
His case belongs here for a single sentence in the Supreme Court of Georgia’s opinion of September 19, 2005, written by Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears, with every justice concurring. The court noted that a verdict of guilty but mentally ill does not bar a death sentence in Georgia. It declined to extend the constitutional bar on executing people with intellectual disabilities to people with mental illness, citing the psychologists' findings that Lewis had exaggerated his symptoms. That is the practical limit of the verdict in that state. It exists as a finding a jury may reach, but it is not a shield. A defendant convicted on that verdict can be sentenced to die, and Lewis, who never even sought the verdict, was sentenced to die twice. He died on Alabama’s death row in July 2009, and the Douglas County Sentinel reported the cause as cancer.
John George Haigh was executed at Wandsworth Prison on August 10, 1949, for the murder of Olive Durand-Deacon, a 69-year-old widow who lived at the same South Kensington hotel as he did. A jury at Lewes Assizes in Sussex had convicted him on July 19, rejecting a defense that he was insane. That killing is the only one for which he was ever charged, tried or convicted.
The case is known for what he told the police. In a statement given in February 1949 he admitted killing Mrs. Durand-Deacon and five other people he knew: William McSwan, Donald and Amy McSwan, and Archibald and Rosalie Henderson. He claimed three more killings that were never confirmed. The statement also contained a claim that he had drunk the blood of his victims, which the prosecution read to the jury and which the defense used to argue that he was mad. The jury did not accept it. The deaths of the McSwans and the Hendersons were never put before a court, and several newspaper histories that say he was convicted of six murders are wrong. He was tried for one.
Haigh did not dispute that he had killed Mrs. Durand-Deacon. The issue was whether the law held him responsible. The test was the M’Naghten Rules, the nineteenth-century formula under which a defendant is excused only if, from a disease of the mind, he did not know what he was doing or did not know that it was wrong. According to the Law Society Gazette’s review of Gordon Lowe’s book on the case, Haigh’s claims of blood-drinking and dreams were aimed at meeting that test, and the defense argued that he may have believed he was acting under divine guidance. The verdict the defense was working toward was the special one then available in England, guilty of the act but insane at the time, a verdict that would have sent him to a secure hospital rather than to the gallows.
What decided the case was cross-examination. The defense called a psychiatrist, Dr. Henry Yellowlees, and the prosecution did not try to rebut his general account of Haigh’s mind. It did not need to. Yellowlees accepted that Haigh had known what he was doing was wrong. In Lowe’s words, quoted in the Gazette: "once Dr Yellowlees admitted that this man knew he was doing wrong, that was an end to the case." Under M’Naghten, a defendant who knew his act was wrong could not succeed, whatever else was wrong with him.
The jury retired and returned in a short time. Lowe puts it at about half an hour; other accounts say less. It convicted Haigh of murder, did not return the special verdict, and Mr. Justice Humphreys sentenced him to death. Lowe adds a footnote about the judge: Travers Humphreys later retired to the Onslow Court Hotel, where Haigh had lived. Lowe also treats the blood-drinking claim as possibly a calculated move toward Broadmoor. Whether Haigh drank anyone’s blood was never established. The prosecution told the jury the statement might or might not be true, and what the jury rejected was the defense built on it.
Haigh’s case is the cleanest illustration here of what a special verdict was for and why it so rarely arrived. In 1949 England had no middle category. Diminished responsibility did not exist in English law until the Homicide Act 1957, eight years after his execution, and a defendant who could not satisfy M’Naghten had no other route off the scaffold except a reprieve.
The route England built after Haigh is the one a young man from Hull took in January 1981. Between 1973 and 1979, eleven fires in and around Hull, in northern England, killed 26 people. All but one were recorded at the time as accidents. In 1980 a 19-year-old who called himself Bruce Lee confessed to the one fire that had plainly been set on purpose, a December 1979 blaze that killed three brothers, and then, over the following weeks, to ten others. At Leeds Crown Court, before Mr. Justice Tudor Evans, he faced eleven indictments charging 11 counts of arson, 26 counts of murder and alternative counts of manslaughter.
The day before the pleas his leading counsel, Harry Ognall QC, and junior counsel Peter Heppel met the judge in private. Ognall said his instructions worried him because his client kept changing position; this was, he said, "about the fourth change of tack." He also told the judge that a public inquiry had held the Hessle fire accidental. A letter from the defense solicitors in March 1981, later given weight by the Court of Appeal, recorded that counsel had serious doubts about whether the pleas were proper, particularly on the Hessle fire. Psychiatrists instructed by both sides concluded that Lee had a psychopathic disorder, that he was fit to plead, and that his responsibility was diminished.
On January 20, 1981, he pleaded guilty to all 11 counts of arson, charged as arson with intent to endanger life or reckless as to whether life was endangered, and to 26 counts of manslaughter on the ground of diminished responsibility. The Crown did not proceed on the murder counts. The same day the judge ordered him detained without limit of time at Park Lane Hospital in Liverpool, under sections 60 and 65 of the Mental Health Act 1959. That is the sentencing consequence of the verdict: a man convicted of 26 deaths received not a life term with a minimum, but an indefinite hospital order under which release depends on doctors and a restriction rather than on the passing of a tariff. The Court of Appeal noted in 2022 that his pleas were clear and consistent and that no one has argued the judge should have refused them.
The case has never rested quietly. The prosecution relied mainly on his confessions, with no identification or forensic evidence tying him to any fire, according to the Criminal Cases Review Commission and the arguments reported from his 2021 appeal. The explanations he gave for the fires changed repeatedly; the Court of Appeal listed among them sexual arousal, money, being the accomplice of a more skilled arsonist, hatred of people, and a liking for fire engines. Doctors who saw him soon afterward recorded the same instability. Dr. Snowden, reporting in June 1981, recorded that he wavered between accepting responsibility for all of the fires, some of them, or none; Dr. Neill, reporting in November 1982, described him as "highly suggestible, unreliable."
In 1982 a national newspaper published articles and a dossier questioning whether he had set the fires. On June 28, 1982, Assistant Chief Constable Vivian Brook of South Wales Constabulary was appointed to investigate the conduct of the Humberside officers. He reported no wrongdoing apart from limited criticism of one former detective sergeant that did not affect the safety of the convictions, and said he had no material doubt that Lee was responsible. At the 1983 appeal Ognall chose not to rely on the newspaper’s theories, which the 2022 court described as having been shown to be unfounded. The hearing was confined to three fires. On November 25 the Court of Appeal ruled the conviction for the June 1979 fire safe, and on December 2 it announced that it would quash the Hessle convictions. The court accepted that the officer had obtained and recorded the statements properly, but identified weaknesses in the scientific evidence about the fire, and concluded that "none of us think that it would be safe to allow the convictions to stand." One count of arson and 11 of manslaughter were quashed, and the hospital order continued on the rest.
The Criminal Cases Review Commission referred the case again in October 2019. The appeal was heard in London over nine days from October 11, 2021, before Lord Justice Fulford, Mr. Justice Hilliard and Lord Hughes. His barrister, Tim Barnes QC, told the court on the first day that his client had been psychologically vulnerable when he confessed, that without the confessions he would never have been charged, and that he had denied responsibility for the fires for 35 years. Barnes argued that Lee’s disabilities would have made carrying fuel and setting the fires as described extremely difficult or impossible. On February 8, 2022, the court quashed the convictions for two more fires, a June 1976 fire and an April 1977 fire, with three manslaughter counts and two arson counts, and ruled the rest safe. The reasoning for upholding them turned on the pleas: he had admitted guilt in open court, with legal advice and after psychiatric assessment. Twelve manslaughter convictions and eight arson convictions stand. He has used several names: Peter Dinsdale at birth, Bruce George Peter Lee by 1980, later Peter Mawson and Peter Tredget.
It is a rare case in which the diminished responsibility verdict, chosen as a compromise that would keep a vulnerable defendant out of a murder conviction, became both the foundation of the sentence and the obstacle to its undoing.
The Homicide Act 1957 defense was also tried, and dropped, in the case of David Fuller. Fuller murdered two young women in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, in 1987. Wendy Knell, 25, was killed in June of that year, and Caroline Pierce, 20, in November. The cases became one of the longest unsolved double killings in the United Kingdom. Fuller, a married electrician, was not identified until 2020, when familial DNA work traced the killer’s profile to one of his relatives. He was arrested on December 3, 2020, at Heathfield, East Sussex, and charged the next day.
He admitted killing both women but denied murder, claiming manslaughter on the ground of diminished responsibility because, he said, he had been suffering from a mental illness at the time. His trial opened at Maidstone Crown Court at the start of November 2021, and he took part by video link. The prosecutor told the jury that the killer had taken precautions and acted with care, which was not the behavior of a man who was mentally unfit, and that the material on his hard drives showed he took sexual gratification from his acts rather than being driven by mental illness. The jury also heard that in 1987 Fuller lived about two and a half miles from the two women’s addresses, that he had the use of a car, and that car movements had been observed at the time of each killing.
Fuller did not wait for the verdict. On November 4, 2021, midway through the trial, he pleaded guilty to both murders, abandoning the diminished responsibility claim that had been the only point of the defense. The prosecution had rejected it. On December 15, 2021, Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb sentenced him at Maidstone to a whole life order for the murders, with a concurrent 12-year term for 51 other offenses to which he had also pleaded guilty. Further offenses followed in 2022: a further four years, concurrent, was imposed on December 7, 2022, for 16 more offenses. The judge ruled both killings sexually motivated.
The contrast with Bruce Lee is instructive. Lee pleaded to manslaughter and received a hospital order; Fuller claimed manslaughter, withdrew under the weight of the Crown’s evidence, and received the heaviest sentence English law provides. An independent inquiry chaired by Sir Jonathan Michael examined how he went unnoticed in two hospital mortuaries, and its second report, published on July 15, 2025, warned that the crimes could be repeated. He was serving the whole life order at that date.
Robert Black was a delivery driver who carried posters for a London firm to towns across Britain and to Northern Ireland. He was convicted of kidnapping and murdering four girls between 1981 and 1986: Jennifer Cardy, 9, in Northern Ireland; Susan Maxwell, 11, on the Scottish border; Caroline Hogg, 5, in Edinburgh; and Sarah Harper, 10, in Leeds. In 1994, at Newcastle upon Tyne Crown Court, he was convicted of the murders of Maxwell, Hogg and Harper, and Mr. Justice Macpherson passed life sentences with a minimum term of 35 years. The Cardy case did not come to trial until 2011, when it was heard at Armagh Crown Court.
The cases against Black were circumstantial. They rested on his employer’s records and his own fuel receipts, which placed him in the area at the time of each offense, and on the pattern of his other crimes. In the Cardy trial the jury of nine women and three men began deliberating on Wednesday, October 26, 2011. The judge told them, "I do not want you to feel under any pressure to reach a conclusion to this trial," and noted that they could find Black guilty of manslaughter rather than murder. They were sent away that evening after almost three hours.
The instruction on manslaughter put a lesser verdict within the jury’s reach. On Thursday, October 27, after four hours and 15 minutes of deliberation over two days, the jury convicted Black of kidnapping and murdering Jennifer Cardy. He showed no emotion. Her mother sobbed in the public gallery and was comforted by her husband. "You have been convicted by a jury of murder," the judge told Black. "There is only one sentence that will be imposed by law." Weatherup J passed a life sentence on October 27 and fixed a minimum term of 25 years on December 8, 2011, with a discretionary life sentence for kidnapping. The Court of Appeal in Northern Ireland dismissed his appeal on June 27, 2013.
What the manslaughter direction did not do is the point of the case. The jury had the lesser verdict in front of it, did not take it, and the sentence that followed was the mandatory one. Black died at HMP Maghaberry on January 12, 2016, aged 68; an inquest jury returned cardiac arrest on December 7, 2018. Devon and Cornwall Police said in 2016 that the Crown Prosecution Service had indicated that "in all probability, we would have charged Robert Black" in the 1978 case of Genette Tate in Devon. He was never charged with that case and never tried for it.
The Bahamas has kept the English structure. Between May and September 2003, four boys from Freeport, the main town on Grand Bahama, were killed: Mackinson Colas, 11; Deangelo McKenzie, 13; Junior Reme, 11; and Desmond Rolle, 14. Police had no answer for months. In October 2003 a 35-year-old warehouse worker named Cordell Farrington went to the police himself and confessed that he had killed them, and that the year before he had killed Jamal Robins, 22, the young man who lived with him.
He was charged with five counts of murder, but none of the five ended in a final murder conviction. The Robins case came first. The defense did not dispute that Farrington had killed Robins; Romona Farquharson argued that he had been suffering from an abnormality of mind at the time. She relied heavily on a psychiatrist, Dr. Michael Neville, and on Farrington’s account of a troubled childhood, to explain the personality disorders she said he had developed. The prosecution’s case was that he was not insane, knew right from wrong, and had killed in cold blood. In her summing-up Justice Anita Allen told the jurors that they were the judges of the facts. The jury retired at about 12:30 p.m. and returned after 3:30 p.m. with a unanimous verdict of guilty of murder. The Tribune reported the verdict on August 19, 2006.
Robins’s relatives were elated, and some cried. "I am very happy with the verdict, justice has been served and now my son can rest," his father said. His mother accused Farrington of "playing crazy." Asked whether he wished to say anything, Farrington told the court, "I turned myself in to police because I knew I committed a crime." Justice Allen sentenced him to death.
In October 2008 the Court of Appeal, with its President, Dame Joan Sawyer, sitting with Justices Milton Ganpatsingh and Emmanuel Osadebay, quashed the murder conviction and the death sentence. The court held that a severe personality disorder had left him unable to form the intention to kill that murder requires. It substituted a conviction for manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility and imposed life imprisonment. The jury in 2006 had returned murder; the lesser verdict was reached by an appeal court two years later.
In 2010, prosecutors accepted Farrington’s pleas of guilty to manslaughter in the four boys' deaths, on the same ground. At the sentencing hearing Senior Justice Jon Isaacs heard the prosecutor read Farrington’s confession statements into the record. The boys' relatives reacted with outbursts, and the judge ordered police to remove them from the courtroom. Farrington apologized to the families. Before passing sentence, Justice Isaacs said nothing in Farrington’s actions showed that he should be allowed back into society, and imposed four life sentences, one for each boy. The Freeport News later gave the date as October 1, 2010. The Grand Bahama families called the manslaughter pleas "a slap in the face," and said that the absence of a death sentence was an insult.
The ending is procedural. In December 2014, at 46, Farrington returned to the Court of Appeal, without a lawyer, and told the judges that when the 2008 panel replaced his murder conviction with manslaughter and life imprisonment, it had done so without hearing anything from him on sentence. He relied on the Privy Council’s ruling in Dominique Moss v The Queen, which in November 2013 held that an appeal court that reduces murder to manslaughter must hear argument on sentence before imposing one. On March 30, 2015, the Court of Appeal set aside the sentence it had itself imposed and sent the case back to the Supreme Court for a proper sentencing hearing, ordering that the manslaughter conviction stand and that Farrington stay in custody meanwhile. The Nassau Guardian called the coming hearing an academic exercise, because the four life sentences for the boys would keep him in prison. As of March 2015 he stood convicted of five counts of manslaughter. Whether the new hearing has taken place has not been reported.
Newspapers in The Bahamas often called Farrington a convicted killer of five. In law, every one of the five ended as manslaughter. One 2010 report said he had pleaded guilty to murder of the boys, but the same report, and every other account of the hearing, says the prosecution accepted pleas to the reduced charge.
Brazil does not have guilty but mentally ill, and it has no manslaughter category for diminished responsibility. It has a three-way classification that a court draws from a psychiatrist’s report: the defendant is imputable and punished in full, not imputable and committed to treatment, or semi-imputable, a middle category in which he understood what he had done but was not fully in control of it. Under Brazilian law that finding could reduce a sentence or send the defendant to a forensic hospital.
Francisco de Assis Pereira was a motorcycle courier in São Paulo when, in July 1998, police linked the deaths of several young women in the south of the city and began looking for one man. He was arrested on August 4, 1998, in Itaqui, a town in Rio Grande do Sul on the border with Argentina, and confessed to the killings soon after he was brought back to São Paulo. The central legal question was his mental state. His defense argued that he had mental health problems, and a psychiatrist, Paulo Argarate Vasques, classified him as semi-imputable, according to Diário do Litoral. The jurors and judges rejected it and held him fully responsible, so he was sentenced to an ordinary prison and not to a forensic hospital.
Diário do Litoral reports that there were four trials between 2001 and 2002. At trial he maintained his confession but blamed the devil, and on his lawyers' advice he later said he could not remember how many victims there had been, the same report says. Band dates his jury trial to 2000, and a photo caption in Metrópoles says a jury in 2002 sentenced him to 121 years for the deaths of five women. Juries convicted him of seven murders with other charges. He has given totals of nine and 11, and police attribute 11 victims to him, but killings beyond the seven were never tried. His combined sentences are reported variously as 260, 268, 276, 285 years or more, the figure Diário do Litoral gives being 285 years, 11 months and 10 days. Under the 30-year maximum in force for his crimes, the end of his time in prison is projected for August 2028.
The semi-imputability finding matters again because that date is approaching. In October 2024 the prosecutor Edilson Mougenot Bonfim told Migalhas that the danger was contained only while Pereira was in prison and that his personality and disorder would be the same outside. He argued that the 1984 reform of the Penal Code, which replaced a system of sentence plus security measure with a choice of one or the other, had been a very serious mistake, and he argued for life imprisonment in Brazil. Metrópoles quoted him as saying that a psychiatrist would have to be completely irresponsible to certify Pereira fit for release.
In 2026 São Paulo’s public prosecutor’s office opened a procedure to assess compulsory psychiatric internment. The assessments described were preliminary. Two psychologists reported that his cognitive functions were preserved and that he was polite and cooperative; one report recommended neurological follow-up and a further psychiatric evaluation. The state prison administration told the prosecutors there were no conclusive technical grounds for a finding of mental insanity or for compulsory internment. The defense objected to assessments carried out by the state alone and said no diagnosis supported such an extreme measure. On October 19, 2026, NC News reported that the procedure was still open, that the evaluations remained preliminary with no definitive diagnosis, and that August 2028 was a projected date, not a confirmed release.
Brazil’s system is the only one described here that lets the same psychiatric question return after the sentence has been served. The courts that rejected semi-imputability in 2001 and 2002 closed the question for sentencing purposes. The procedure opened in 2026 reopens it, in a different form, at the other end.
The cases do not support a simple reading. The middle verdicts, guilty but mentally ill, diminished responsibility, semi-imputability, were asked for by defendants who had every reason to ask, and they were won in only some of the courtrooms. Bruce Lee received a hospital order. Farrington, by appeal and by plea, was reduced to manslaughter in all five cases. Urdiales, Rivera and Haigh asked for a different outcome and were refused it. Lewis never asked, and received it as a footnote in the court’s opinion that it would not have saved him.
Two patterns recur. One is expert disagreement. In Livingston County five experts gave four diagnoses; in Georgia a defense neurologist helped the prosecution; at Lewes the defense psychiatrist conceded the one fact that ended the case. Courts have never needed an expert to agree that a defendant is troubled. They have needed one to say, in terms the law accepts, that the trouble removed his ability to choose, and few did. The other pattern is that the verdict is rarely the end. Haigh’s was; Urdiales’s was reviewed three times; Lee’s was revisited twice across forty years; Farrington’s returned on a sentencing technicality a decade after the crime. A verdict between guilty and acquitted is supposed to settle what kind of person stands in the dock. These cases suggest it often settles only what kind of sentence he receives.
• July 19, 1949: A jury at Lewes Assizes convicts John George Haigh of murder without returning the special verdict of guilty but insane. He is executed at Wandsworth Prison on August 10.
• 1957: The Homicide Act introduces diminished responsibility in England and Wales.
• January 20, 1981: At Leeds Crown Court, Bruce George Peter Lee pleads guilty to 26 counts of manslaughter on the ground of diminished responsibility and to 11 counts of arson, and is ordered detained at Park Lane Hospital without limit of time.
• December 1983: The Court of Appeal quashes the Hessle convictions (one arson and 11 manslaughter counts).
• 1994: Robert Black is convicted at Newcastle upon Tyne Crown Court of three child murders and sentenced to life with a minimum of 35 years.
• February 2000: A Baldwin County, Alabama, jury convicts Gerald Patrick Lewis of capital murder.
• November 19, 2001: Lewis pleads guilty in Douglas County, Georgia.
• September 3, 2002: Andrew Urdiales, convicted by a Cook County jury that rejected insanity and mental illness, is sentenced to death.
• January 23, 2004: A Richmond County, Georgia, jury rejects the defense of mental illness and convicts Reinaldo Rivera on all 14 counts.
• May 10, 2004: A Livingston County, Illinois, judge rejects Urdiales’s plea of guilty but mentally ill and his insanity defense.
• September 19, 2005: The Supreme Court of Georgia affirms Lewis’s death sentence, noting that guilty but mentally ill does not bar death.
• August 2006: A Nassau jury convicts Cordell Farrington of murder in the Robins case.
• June 25, 2007: The Supreme Court of Georgia affirms Rivera’s conviction and death sentence.
• October 2008: The Bahamas Court of Appeal substitutes manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility in the Robins case.
• 2010: Farrington pleads guilty to manslaughter of four boys; four life sentences follow.
• October 27, 2011: Black is convicted at Armagh Crown Court of the murder of Jennifer Cardy.
• May 23 to October 5, 2018: An Orange County jury convicts Urdiales of five murders, recommends death on June 13, and he is sentenced on October 5; he dies in custody in November.
• November 4, 2021: David Fuller pleads guilty to two murders midway through his trial.
• February 8, 2022: The Court of Appeal quashes two more of Lee’s fire convictions and upholds the rest.
• September 13, 2024: Rivera’s federal habeas petition is denied; the Eleventh Circuit appeal is docketed February 26, 2025.
• October 19, 2026: A Brazilian prosecutors' procedure on compulsory internment of Francisco de Assis Pereira is reported still open.