Defense rests in Tim Jones child-killing trial as psychiatrist says Jones is insane

On Friday, the 13th day of Tim Jones’ death penalty trial, the defense rested after presenting 26 witnesses to a Lexington County jury.

The defense’s last witness, a psychiatrist who studied Jones’ case extensively and interviewed him for some 19 hours during the last two years. told the jury that Jones, a single father, was clearly delusional in August 2014 when he killed his five children ages 1-8 at the family’s mobile home in Red Bank.

“Is Tim not guilty by reason of insanity?” defense attorney Boyd Young asked psychiatrist Julie Dorney, who had examined Jones and thousands of case records.

“That is the ultimate question,” replied Dorney, who then had to wait before Judge Eugene “Bubba” Griffith overruled a defense objection and allowed her to go ahead.

Young then asked the question again.

“Is it your opinion that to a reasonable degree of medical certainty ... that Tim was legally insane?” Young asked.

“Yes,” replied Dorney, an adjunct professor at Emory University School of Medicine.

“Your honor, the defense rests,” Young told the judge.

Closing arguments by defense and prosecution will likely take place Monday. The jury will begin deliberating either later Monday or Tuesday.

The defense’s last three witnesses were psychiatrists whose testimony will be crucial in the jury’s deliberations.

In a death penalty case where a defendant is pleading “not guilty by reason of insanity,” as Jones is doing, the jury under state law has three main choices: “guilty,” “not guilty by reason of insanity” and “guilty but mentally ill.” The jury also has the choice of finding Jones “not guilty,” but he has confessed to killing his five children, then driving around the Southeast for more than a week with their bodies in the back of his SUV. He eventually dumped them in rural Alabama.

There are differing complex standards for each jury finding. If the jury finds “guilty,” that means it believes Jones knew the killings were wrong from a moral and legal standpoint. A finding of “not guilty by reason of insanity” means the jury believes Jones was living in a completely delusional world and didn’t know what he was doing was wrong, from either a legal or moral standpoint A finding of “guilty but mentally ill” means the jury found Jones’s judgment was impaired by mental illness but he knew right from wrong.

Dorney’s testimony Friday illustrated the complexities of the case.

She recalled earlier testimony that Jones accidentally killed his son, Nahtahn, 6, by making him do an excessive amount of exercise, and the child likely dehydrated and died. Jones’ strict religious beliefs about child punishment were so intense as to be delusional and therefore insane, Dorney told jurors. Jones’s beliefs that he had a moral right to punish Nahtahn that way, even if the boy died accidentally as a result, constituted insanity, Dorney said.

Dorney also labeled as “insane” Jones’ methodical killings of his remaining four children — Merah, 8; Elias, 7; Gabriel, 2, and Abigail Elaine, 1 — when he choked them to death one-by-one. Although he knew what his actions were a crime, Jones’ delusional religious beliefs convinced him that killing them was the right thing to do.

Jones said he didn’t want the surviving four children growing up without a mother or a father and instead, he wanted to send them to heaven where they would all be together, taken care of and where he would see them some day, testified Dorney.

Jones believed “to a moral certainty” that he was doing the right thing when he killed them, and that meant he was insane, she testified.

Her ultimate diagnoses for Jones: schizoaffective disorder.

“It is a combination of psychotic symptoms or thought disorder and a mood disorder,” she testified. People with that diagnosis can have hallucinations or delusions and mania and depression.

Dorney estimated she stands to be paid at least some $30,000 by the defense for the 100 hours she spent on the case so far.

Jones’s thinking was so deranged the night he killed the children because over the past few weeks he had increasingly been working himself up into a paranoid mental state where he lost completely touch with reality, Dorney told the jury. Jones was in a manic and psychotic state marked by lack of sleep, major depression and increased use of Spice, a drug that made him lose touch with reality. He also increasingly believed his children were plotting to kill him, she testified.

Another psychiatrist testifying for the defense Friday was Beverly Wood, who works for the S.C. Department of Corrections and has treated Jones for nearly four years, ever since his arrest.

Wood, who was not paid by the defense for her testimony, did not label Jones insane but said he is clearly unbalanced.

“He has a mental illness that has psychotic components,” Wood testified, adding Jones defies easy labels.

This story was originally published May 31, 2019 at 8:07 PM.