DEL.ICIO.USBRIAN NICHOLS TRIAL
Nichols’ ex-lawyer: ‘There’s something wrong with this guy’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Friday, October 17, 2008
Signs were abundant that Brian Nichols was losing his grip on reality and was plotting a violent escape from the Fulton County courthouse at least two days before he is accused of breaking free of a holding cell on March 11, 2005, beating a female deputy nearly to death and gunning down four people.
Nobody was more worried about that than Superior Court Judge Rowland Barnes, who would die first, shot in the head from nearly point-blank range as he sat on the bench in his courtroom.
KIMBERLY SMITH / ksmith@ajc.com
Murder defendant Brian Nichols takes notes during his death penalty trial Friday, Oct. 17, 2008.
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Barnes, the judge in Nichols’ rape trial, had only the day before ordered courtroom security beefed up after Nichols was discovered on March 9 to have hidden iron hinges in his shoes.
Nichols confessed later that he planned to use the hinges as weapons to overpower guards and get a gun.
Barry Hazen, the attorney representing Nichols in the rape trial, testified Friday that he and Barnes talked in Barnes’ chambers on March 10 about Nichols’ increasingly erratic behavior and how dangerous his client had become.
“He was a very fine man,” Hazen said, describing the judge he had known 15 years. “He put his hand on my shoulder and said: ‘You’re sitting closest to him [Nichols] — be careful.”
Hazen, the sixth witness called by the defense in the current trial, spent almost eight hours on the stand Thursday and Friday. Lead defense attorney Henderson Hill sought to lay the groundwork for Nichols’ defense that he should be found not guilty because he was insane when he went on his killing spree.
Nichols is charged with killing Barnes and court reporter Julie Ann Brandau in Barnes’ courtroom, Fulton County Deputy Hoyt Teasley on the street outside the courthouse, and later that night in Buckhead, U.S. Customs agent David Wilhelm.
Hazen said the circumstances surrounding the rape of Nichols’ former, longtime girlfriend gave him the first hint that Nichols might be mentally off. For the alleged attack, the lawyer said, Nichols wore an Army ranger T-shirt, and brought a machine gun, a cooler of food and a pitcher of iced tea to the girlfriend’s condo.
“I began to think: ‘Is this guy going to a war, is he going to a picnic, or is he going to rape somebody?” said Hazen. “This was an odd series of things.”
Hazen testified that Nichols insisted that the former girlfriend still loved him and wouldn’t testify against him even though she brought the rape charges against him and the rape was so violent that she was injured.
Nichols was emboldened because he had testified in his first rape trial and that had ended in a hung jury, Hazen said.
Nichols had turned down a plea deal, which Barnes had agreed to, that would give him 15 years in prison instead of the 25 or more years he was likely to get if convicted — which Hazen told Nichols he expected.
Nichols believed he was such a ladies’ man he could win over the jury in the second trial the way that he had in the first. “A jury’s going to love me,” Hazen testified Nichols told him. “‘I’m a handsome man. All we need is women on the jury, and Barry, you don’t have to worry.”
All of that behavior, Hazen testified, “gave rise to my thought: ‘There’s something wrong with this guy.’”
Under questioning by defense attorney Henderson Hill, Hazen said it was possible that the Nichols he knew — mentally ill, but not insane — could have become insane since the last time he talked to him, March 10, 2005.
But on that day, “the day before he shot and killed four people, you did not think he was legally insane?” prosecuting attorney Kellie Hill asked the attorney on cross examination.
“No, I did not,” said Hazen.
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