Zoloft Defense Trial
South Carolina vs Pittman

Associated Press
Attorneys ask for reduced sentence in Pittman case
February 24, 2005

CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) - Attorneys for Christopher Pittman asked a state judge to reduce the 15-year-old youth's sentence for murder from 30 years in prison to time served and probation until he is 21.

Pittman was convicted last week of two counts of murder in the slayings of his grandparents in their Chester County home back in 2001. Pittman, who was 12 at the time of the killings, was tried as an adult.

He received two concurrent 30-year sentences in the slayings of Joe Pittman, 66, and his wife, Joy, 62 who were shot in their sleep in their Chester County home.

The defense contended Pittman was involuntarily intoxicated by the antidepressant Zoloft at the time and couldn't tell right from wrong.

Before the trial, defense attorneys sought to have the case moved back to Family Court, saying trying Pittman as an adult violated the 8th Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

But ruling at the time, Circuit Court Judge Danny Pieper noted that there was then no conviction and no sentencing, so the motion was premature.

Now, however, a verdict and sentence "presents no bar to full consideration of the 8th Amendment issue," defense attorney Andy Vickery wrote in a motion filed late Wednesday.

"The only way to remedy the constitutional defect is to do precisely what the United States Supreme Court and other federal courts have done in analogous situations ... to reduce the sentence down at least to the constitutionally permissible maximum," the motion said.

That sentence would be, the motion said, confinement until Pittman is 21. That is the maximum Pittman could have received if convicted in Family Court.

The motion seeks credit for the more than three years Pittman has been in custody and asks that the rest of the sentence be probated.

It argued that the crime was committed when Pittman was 12 -- "when the frontal lobe of the brain -- those areas most implicated in criminal culpability -- is still in its infancy."

The brain goes through a dramatic transformation during adolescence, it noted.

"How then can a civilized society assess the same culpability for, and impose the same punishment on, a 12-year-old as you would impose on a grown man?" the motion asked.

"Exposing such a person to the same punishment as an adult is excessive under any conceivable standard of decency," Vickery wrote.

Prosecutors had no comment on the motion.