If you slash your grandmother 60 times and steal her car, don't roll the vehicle during your get-away!

2016-M-315         State of Minnesota, Respondent, vs. Ishmael Roberts, Appellant.

THE CRIME:  In 1996, Roberts was “adopted” from Liberia in his mid-teens and was moved to Minnesota by his “grandmother” B.W.  On October 29^th, 2012, police responded to a stabbing reported at B.W.’s home in Minneapolis.  B.W. had been stabbed or slashed 60 times.  Another “relative of Roberts, 14-year-old P.W., had been stabbed and slashed 59 times, including a throat wound that nearly severed his head.  A resident of B.W.’s home told police she had seen Roberts on the scene an hour before the police alert.

Police noted that B.W.’s car was missing.  The car was found in a roll-over accident in Waterloo, Iowa that morning.  Police found Roberts a few blocks away.  They also found shoes covered with P.W.’s blood.

THE TRIAL: Because Roberts had a long history of mental issues, the trial judge ordered a competency assessment of Roberts.  The psychiatrist reported that Roberts knew what he was doing and that what he was doing was morally wrong when he stabbed the two people to death.  A second psychiatrist conducted a second analysis of Roberts.  He reported that Roberts knew what he had done was morally wrong, as reflected by his conduct before the murders and during his interstate flight.

After a bifurcated trial, the trial judge convicted Roberts of first-degree two counts of premeditated murder and sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of release.

After the second phase, in which the district court heard expert psychiatric testimony, the district court rejected Roberts’s mental-illness defense. Although Roberts “suffered from a mental illness,” the district court found that Roberts did not establish a mental-illness defense, Minn. Stat. § 611.026, because Roberts failed to prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, that he did not know the nature of his acts or that they were morally wrong at the time of the murders.

THIS APPEAL:  On this direct appeal, the Supreme Court held that the district court did not clearly err by finding that appellant failed to prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, that appellant did not know his acts were morally wrong at the time that he murdered two of his family members.

Anderson (Gildea, Dietzen, Stras, Lillehaug)

Took No Part:  Hudson.

[CRIME] [MURDER] [FIRST-DEGREE] [PREMEDITATED]

Date: March 16, 2016