Jaycee Dugard, as she is now, on the cover of People

The Mayor of Claycord came across this People magazine exclusive:

Kidnap Survivor Jaycee Dugard Emerges from the Shadows, and with a more recent photo of her on the cover. You can see it here.

According to People, "Dugard is now living in seclusion with her mom, Terry Probyn, 50, and the two daughters – Angel, 15, and Starlit, 11 – fathered by her alleged kidnapper, Phillip Garrido, Dugard, 29, has begun the slow process of recovery. She rides horses, cooks meals and is thinking of collaborating on a book."

People says, you can read much more about her life, "including stunning photographs of her family, details of her reunion with the sister she hadn't seen since 1991 and her deepening bond with her mother--pick up the new issue of People, on newsstands Friday."

However, Dugard was not interviewed for the article. Rather, according to MSNBC, people close to her spoke at length about her rehabilitation and that of her two daughters. The 10-page article is accompanied by many pictures of Dugard and her mother. Dugard’s daughters are shown only from the back.

As for whether Dugard received money for allowing herself or her family to be photographed? People's managing editor, Larry Hackett, when asked by Today's Matt Lauer, declined to discuss those details, although he admitted the magazine had paid for photos in the past. These photos were taken by a private photographer engaged by the family

So, it looks like People didn't beat Oprah "I want Jaycee Dugard" Winfrey to the Jaycee interview. She still has a chance at her own exclusive.

But speaking of Oprah, the two UC Berkeley police employees, one from Brentwood and one from San Ramon, who helped discover Dugard, after her 18 years of captivity, were on Oprah's show yesterday.

Contra Costa’s Phillip Garrido: The possible specter undermining even French support for Roman Polanski

Try to put yourself in the difficult position of being Roman Polanski’s PR guy. You have to carry the message to the international community that some kind of violation of justice and human rights has taken place in his case with the arrest last weekend of the 76-year-old Academy Award-winning director. Sure, you have statements of support from cinema and arts luminaries, including Martin Scorsese, Penelope Cruz, Pedro Almodovar, and—rather difficult from a PR point of view—Woody Allen.

By the way, I admire all the works of all these filmmakers, just as I have very much liked some of Polanski’s works, notably Chinatown.

But, my goodness, Polanski’s famous supporters are really bumping up against the Zeitgest, especially in the new post-Phillip Garrido world.

Of course, even before child kidnap and rape victim Jaycee Dugard was discovered in August, after being held captive for 18 years, allegedly by Garrido, attitudes about crimes against children had been evolving since 1977.

That’s the year when Polanski brought a 13-year-old girl to movie buddy Jack Nicholson’s house. Polanski fed the girl alcohol and a quaalude and raped her, vaginally and anally. Polanski didn’t contest the allegations, and in fact pled guilty, although not to the more serious charges of rape and sodomy. He was allowed to plead guilty to the lesser charge of unlawful sex with a minor. Can you imagine any prosecutor agreeing to such a deal these days. Polanski expected to be given a jail sentence that would give him credit for the time he served undergoing a psychiatric evaluation. When he heard that a judge—a notably publicity-seeking judge—didn’t want to abide by the terms of the plea agreement and throw him into prison for a very long time, Polanski left the United States and never came back.

He settled in Paris, where French officials long rejected U.S. requests to extradite him. He also traveled fairly widely around the world where he made films and showed up at film festivals and awards ceremonies. He also went back and forth to Switzerland, where he was finally arrested.

During the three decades since Polanski's crime, public awareness has grown exponentially about the devastating long-term consequences child sex abuse has for its victims. Certainly in the United States, we’ve been hit with some nasty, high-profile cases of child abduction, sexual assault and murder, and we’ve seen the creation of laws that create public databases of registered sex offenders.

Still, outrage against Polanski continued to be muted. A consensus was even growing that America should forgive him for what he did in 1977. The argument was: So much time has passed, and Polanski, in his personal life, had suffered so much, as a Holocaust survivor and the widower of Charles Manson victim, Sharon Tate.

When he won an Academy Award for Best Director for 2002’s The Pianist, Polanski, not present at the Oscar ceremonies, nonetheless received a standing ovation . Then in 2008, an Emmy-winning documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, reignited debate about his case by uncovering new information about possible misconduct by the sentencing judge. Polanski’s victim, now in her 40s, also stated that she forgives him and didn’t think he should be put in jail.

Who knows what would have happened if Polanski had returned to Los Angeles County to press his case that, because of judicial misconduct, his case should be dismissed? That is, if he returned before August, before Dugard was discovered in Contra Costa County.

The recovery of Dugard, now 29, as well as the imagined horrors she endured during those 18 years in Garrido's captivity, has been a top story, not just in the United States but around the world. What Dugard lived through reached, in my opinion, concentration camp-level atrocities.

Like us in Contra Costa County and in the United States, people in France and Switzerland, where Polanski long enjoyed a safe haven, also had the chance to learn about some of the most disturbing details of Dugard’s ordeal.

How she was kidnapped at 11 from her home in South Lake Tahoe, and allegedly raped by Phillip and Nancy Garrido. How she twice became pregnant by Garrido, the first time when she was a young teenager, around the age of Polanski’s victim.

After Polanski’s arrest last weekend, the French government initially stated its dismay over this turn of events. But, as the New York Times says, “the mood was shifting among French politicians Tuesday about whether the government should have rushed to rally around Polanski around the Oscar-winning director.

The mood among the French public is hostile to Polanski’s cause. “Of the 30,000 participants in an online poll by the French daily Le Figaro, more than 70 percent said Mr. Polanski should face justice. And in the magazine Le Point, more than 400 letter writers were almost universal in their disdain for Mr. Polanski.”

On Thursday, the French government backtracked on its support for Polanski, with spokesman Luc Chatel saying Polanski should face justice because he “is neither above nor beneath the law.” A backlash has also been growing against the free-Polanski petition being circulated by show business luminaries.

In the various articles I’ve read about the Polanski saga, I haven’t seen Phillip Garrido’s name mentioned. But I wonder if what Garrido allegedly did to Jaycee Lee Dugard is fresh in the minds of even the French public, whom we have always been given to believe were so laissez faire about Polanski’s indiscretions.

I wonder whether Phillip Garrido is the unnamed co-conspirator derailing the public relations effort to win the director sympathy, and whether this convicted rapist and registered sex offender will be the reason that Polanski will most certainly wind up back in the United States facing serious jail time.

Jaycee apparently says: Garrido didn't molest my daughters

This is one key question many of us have wondered about but have probably thought too indelicate to ask, at least publicly. After all, we're wondering about a pretty horrific possibility, whether accused kidnapper and rapist Phillip Garrido also molested the two daughters, 11 and 15, that he fathered with his alleged victim and hostage of 18 years, Jaycee Lee Dugard.

Apparently, he didn't.

"She's saying he didn't touch her kids," says one law enforcement source who is following the investigation. This news is according to the Matier & Ross column in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle.

Garrido and his wife Nancy are suspected of housing Jaycee Dugard, now 29, and her daughters in a hidden lair of tents and sheds in the back of their large property in unincorporated Antioch. During her entire captivity, which started when she was kidnapped at age 11 from her South Lake Tahoe home in June 1991, Dugard never went to school or saw a doctor. This includes when she became pregnant as a young teenager with her two daughters, and when she gave birth to them.

Both Garridos have been charged with raping Dugard. But according to Matier and Ross, "Dugard is telling authorities that Phillip Garrido 'hadn't touched her in years,' one source says."

New information (?) emerges in Ilene Misheloff's abduction as police search Garrido's home in unsolved cases

In the official, public version of Ilene Misheloff’s disappearance, she was seen leaving her Dublin middle school on the afternoon of January 30, 1989. And then she never made it home or to her ice skating practice Maybe at one point, in the nearly 21 a long time ago, police mentioned having a witness who described seeing someone who looked like Ilene getting into a car that afternoon.

But it was never a point they never emphasized, either because they thought the witness’ memory was sketchy or because this information was something they wanted to keep to themselves. “We never had any eyewitnesses to say for sure that she was abducted,” said Lt. no eyewitness to say for sure she’s been abducted,

Now, Dublin police say this witness’ sighting, and the car described by the witness, is one of the factors that helped them secure a to join Hayward police in the search of the Antich home of Jaycee Lee Dugard’s accused kidnappers, Phillip and Nancy Garrido.

Hayward police are looking for any evidence at Garrido’s home and yard, and on a neighboring property, that Garrido was involved in the November 1988 kidnapping of Michaela Garecht, 9, of Hayward. Of the possibility that Garrido could be Michaela’s kidnapper, Lt. Christine Orrey of the Hayward police said that, of the more than 13,000 tips investigators received, “this is one of the strongest leads we’ve pursued thus far.”

An eyewitness, Michaela’s friend, actually saw her being pulled into a car outside the neighborhood grocery store that the two girls had biked to on a Saturday morning. This fact was mentioned in every story about the abduction, and a police sketch of a suspect accompanied most stories.

A beat-up sedan towed from Garrido’s property is similar to the car Michaela was pulled into, says Orrey. The brazen daylight kidnapping of Michaela is also similar to how Jaycee was abducted. She was grabbed in view of her stepfather as she made her way to a bus stop near her South Lake Tahoe home in June 1991.

Moreover, photos of Garrido from the late 1970s and early 1980s, with him wearing stringy shoulder-length hair, are similar to the police sketch of Michaela’s abductor. Finally, Garrido was living in a halfway house in Oakland at the time of her kidnapping.

Dublin police are being a bit more restrained in suggesting, in any way, that they have solved Ilene’s disappearance, which has haunted the community of Dublin since it happened. However, Lt. Kurt Von Savoye said the sedan found on Garrido’s property is also similar to the car Ilene may have gotten into.

Both lieutenants say the search of the Garrido property and an adjacent property, for which Garrido served as a caretaker, started at 7 a.m. and could take several days. The search will be thorough and methodical. Police and criminalists will be looking for clothing that belonged to either Ilene or Michaela and, yes, they will be looking for remains. The search could involve digging under the house, and even razing parts of it.

Sharon Munch, the mother of Michaela, said at a later afternoon press conference: “I’m hoping this will lead to a resolution.” She, of course, hopes that Michaela, like Jaycee after 18 years, will turn up alive.

Munch said she always wondered if the same person who kidnapped Jaycee had abducted her daughter, because of the similarity in the description of the suspect.

She added that she spoke to the eyewitness in her daughter’s case, Michaela’s friend, who told her that Garrido looks as much like Michaela’s kidnapper as anyone she has so far seen.

As police search Garrido's home in other child abductions, more suspicious activity reported around Walnut Creek school kids

UPDATE: School officials warn of suspicious activity around Walnut Acres Elementary and Walnut Creek Intermediate and in the Parkmead Elementary area.

Claycord.com reports that the principal of Walnut Acres Elementary in Walnut Creek had sent out a notice regarding an incident earlier today. A young man on foot, and "mumbling under his breath," approached a fourth-grader at Walnut Acres back gate after school was dismissed. The student stomped on the man's foot and ran away to safety. "Please note that this man does not match the description of the person involved in the situations at Pleasant Hill Middle School," wrote Principal Colleen Dowd.

Early today, I reported that Walnut Creek School District Superintendent Patricia Wool had just sent out this advisory to parents, about two incidents involving men with cameras, possibly photographing students. One was in the Parkmead area and one was near Walnut Creek Intermediate.

School and police officials are on alert following the possible attempted kidnapping of children near Pleasant Hill Middle School and in Concord, and of a man and woman acting suspiciously around Foothill Middle School in Walnut Creek. To read more about these incidents, click here.

I wouldn't be surprised if some of these alerts to police and school officials have to do with heightened awareness about stranger abductions in light of all the publicity surrounding the kidnapping of Jaycee Lee Dugard, who, now 29, was discovered living with a registered sex offender in Antioch since her 1991 kidnapping.

Police, by the way, are back at Garrido's home today, searching it and a neighboring property for clues in two other child kidnappings from the late 1980s: the November 1988 abduction of 9-year-old Michaela Garecht of Hayward and the January 1989 kidnapping of 13-year-old Ilene Misheloff of Dublin. Hayward police, in particular, are following up on "probably the strongest lead that's ever come in," regarding Michaela's abduction. She was pulled into a car by a man, the police sketch of whom bears a resemblance to photos of Garrido in the late 1970s and early 1980s. At the time of Michaela's abduction, Garrido was living in a halfway house in Oakland.

Anyway, here is Wool's letter:

Dear Walnut Creek School Community:

The Walnut Creek School District is trying to keep you up to date as information comes into the district about descriptions of suspicious actions in the area. I just met with my principals and will pass on two incidents concerning potential photography of students. The first was a sighting of a man in the Parkmead area taking pictures of WCI students at the bus stop. The police were called, and this proved to be someone who lives in the area concerned about traffic and student safety.

The second incident occurred yesterday at WCI where some female PE students reported a man allegedly taking pictures of a PE class from the trail. The girls reported the man to the principal; the East Bay Regional Park District Police were called and did an area check. They found nothing.

We are all trying to be vigilant and will report to the community potential threats. Please know that the police are called, and the administration does follow up on all incidents.

Students at the middle school and elementary schools have been briefed by teachers and administration twice. Students are certainly encouraged to not walk alone to or from school. Again, we will continue to provide information as it becomes available.

Oprah’s so full of you know what. She says "I want Jaycee!"

In today’s Contra Costa Times’ story about accused kidnapper and rapist Phillip Garrido’s bail being set at $30 million, the prosecutor urges the media to not hound his alleged victim, Jaycee Dugard, for interviews.

This plea comes amid reports, the Times says, that Oprah Winfrey had secured an interview, to air in December, and that she was paying $1 million for this scoop.

Oprah’s flak says, no, no, no, her boss has not secured the interview, and then sniffs: “We don’t pay for interviews.”

This response says that Ms. Winfrey is oh-so above hounding a traumatized crime victim like Jaycee Dugard for an interview.

Give me a break.

Sure, it’s probably true that Oprah has not yet secured the interview, but it’s not for lack of effort or desire on her part. In this interview with The Insider last week, the talk show queen (whose show’s ratings are suffering, by the way) states emphatically “I want Jaycee” and that she has expressly put her peeps on the job of nailing that interview. Remember, it was Oprah, also the Queen of Sensitivity, who was responsibility for this particular horror of reality TV. In 2007, she secured an interview with recently recovered teen kidnap victim, Shawn Hornbeck, shortly after his release from 51 months of captivity.

Regarding Jaycee Dugard, recovered after 18 years in captivity and who knows how many instances of physical and sexual abuse, Oprah tells The Insider’s Samantha Harris: "I want that interview."

She continues: "Obviously, like everybody else in this business, I have 'my people' working on that. Now, this is the truth...I really don't care about getting interviews first and all that stuff....Really, truly, I don't play that game. I feel like if somebody wants to talk to me, they will talk to me. If they don't want to talk to me and they want to talk to whomever, fine. But this is the one I want."

Why Rupf's apology over the Jaycee Dugard case shouldn't be held against him if he decides to run again for sheriff

It was the apology heard around the world: Contra Costa Sheriff Warren Rupf's blunt assessment of his department's failure to discover kidnap victim Jaycee Lee Dugard sooner, particularly after it received a 2006 911 call that accused kidnapper Phillip Garrido was a psychotic sex addict who was housing children in tents in his back yard.

In a press conference two days after Dugard's amazing discovery after 18 years in captivity, Rupf also acknowledged that, in 2008, an even larger team of investigators, checking up on sexual predators failed to find the hidden back yard where Phillip and his wife, Nancy, had set up an encampment for Jaycee Dugard and her two daughters with Phillip Garrido.

Rupf's apology was quoted by news organizations all over the world, including the New York Times , national magazines, and especially newspapers and TV networks in the United Kingdom.

Rupf called a news conference to make his apologies, even as the state parole agency was declaring its pride in helping to break the case. "We are beating ourselves up over this," Rupf said, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. "I'm first in line to offer organizational criticism, offer my apologies to the victims and accept responsibility."

Today, I read in Lisa Vorderbrueggen's Sunday political column in the Contra Costa Times that Rupf has delayed decision on whether he will seek re-election for Sheriff. His term ends next year, and he intended to make up his mind by Labor Day.

But he and his department "are deeply involved" in the Dugard kidnapping investigation. Vorderbrueggen doesn't come out and say it. But by noting Rupf's delay in making his decision, in the context of his department missing the chance to rescue Dugard several years ago--well, it raises the question of whether he's worried that his career as sheriff is over.

Now, I've met Rupf. He's a nice, friendly guy when you just meet him at some events. I hear different things about him. I don't agree with everything he has done as sheriff, or with ways his department has handled certain cases. Yeah, members of his department blew it big time with the Dugard case--but then so did other law enforcement agencies.

And Rupf was the only leader of one of these law enforcement agencies with the spine to stand up and say, we blew it.

Do you know how unusual that is? For an elected official to admit a mistake? For the leader of a law enforcement agency to admit a mistake?

It doesn't happen that often. In fact, it's pretty rare, in my experience of covering cops or elected officials. They're never wrong! Actually, lawyers are pretty bad about admitting mistakes, too. And doctors! Are they the worst?

No, you know who is absolutely the worst about admitting errors?

Journalists.

We are the absolute masters of being defensive in the face of criticism, and the art of self-justification. And I love how we hold others in authority--like Warren Rupf--to task for their screw ups or other unprofessional behavior.

Okay, so, back to Rupf. He did something rare. He did something that few of us in our professional lives have the courage to do. He apologized. He took resonsibility. He said, "I'm sorry."

Whether he runs again or not, whether I'd vote for him or not if he did run, I at least give him tons of credit for this one act: taking responsibility for a big huge error in a big, huge super high-profile criminal case.

An insanity defense for Phillip Garrido? I seriously doubt it.

Over the weekend, I came across this headline for an Associated Press story about the Jaycee Lee Dugard case: “Phillip Garrido's mental state likely to be issue at Jaycee Dugard trial."

Sure, the 58-year-old Antioch man's mental condition might come up in some way during upcoming legal proceedings and the trial, but I really can’t see a defense lawyer trying to argue that his client should be declared not guilty by reason of insanity--that his client should be able to avoid criminal responsibility and state prison by saying he was crazy.

First of all, that argument would not fly in the court of public opinion; nor would it appeal to the sympathy of jurors.

But most relevant for any court proceedings, that argument wouldn’t fly legally.

Okay, that’s my humble lay opinion. I’m not a criminal lawyer, nor am I a forensic psychiatrist or psychologist. But bear with me a moment. Through both personal and professional experience, I have become familiar with how our criminal justice system deals with mentally ill defendants. Specifically, in researching several articles about mentally ill defendants, I talked to lawyers in Contra Costa County and the Bay Area and with experts in forensic psychiatry in California and nationally.

And if there are any criminal lawyers or other experts out there who want to share their views or correct what I am about to say, please do so.

First off, under Penal Code Section 25 (b), a person must prove “by a preponderance of the evidence that he was incapable of knowing or understanding the nature and quality of his or her act and of distinghishing right from worng at the time of the commission of the offense.”

What does this mean for Phillip Garrido (or his wife and co-defendant Nancy Garrido, for that matter)? Some key points to consider:

--How the psychiatric profession defines insanity is not at all the same as the way the criminal justice system defines insanity—for the sake of an NGI (not guilty by reason of insanity) defense.

--A person can have been diagnosed with a mental illness, including with one like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia that are known to involve psychosis, or breaks with reality. A person can be off their meds and hearing voices. By a lot of definitions—common sense ones even—this person is “insane.” But that doesn’t mean this person would necessarily be deemed legally insane. As one criminal defense lawyer told the New York Times about that state’s approach to mentally ill defendants—which is similar to California’s: “You can be extremely crazy without being legally insane. You can hear voices, you can operate under intermittent delusions, you can see rabbits in the road that aren’t there and still be legally sane.”

--As stated above, California, like most states, basically defines legal insanity as whether the person, at the time he committed the crime, knows the difference between right and wrong.

--However, there are situations where a defendant can be declared legally insane when he knows the difference between right or wrong, but is driven to commit a crime nonetheless because he is “incapable of knowing or understanding the nature and quality of his act.” Here’s an example given to me by a veteran San Mateo County prosecutor: a young man knew that killing is wrong, but he was under the delusion that his nephew, a toddler, was a demon that needed to be killed. That man was found not guilty by reason of insanity.

--It all gets down to the defendant’s state of mind at the time he or she committed the crime.

--Many defense attorneys and forensic psychiatrists and psychologists believe that this courtroom definition—based on the M’Naughten rule, an 1843 English definition of legal insanity--is narrow and not at all consistent with emerging understanding and research into mental illness and how it presents itself in those afflicted.

--As suggested by that lawyer interviewed by the New York Times, one common misconception about someone who is mentally ill, especially someone with an illness like schizophrenia, is that they are always “out of it.” It is true that some seriously ill people are consistently detached from reality—you might see some of those people muttering to themselves as they shuffle around downtown Walnut Creek.

But a lot of people who are mentally ill, even without medication, flow in and out of reality and delusions, in the same way that “normal” people shift from different moods and states of mind throughout the course of a day. These people may work hard to keep it together so that they can go to work, go to school, have personal relationships. They may be outwardly successful and happy, but inside they are suffering a great deal.

--With defendants whose attorneys try to go the insanity route, the courts want to see a defendant who has been out of it before the crime, is out of it at the time of the crime, and is out of it after his arrest. That’s pretty much what a veteran Contra Costa defense attorney told me. This attorney has specialized in working with juvenile defendants, and I was talking to him about a particular case, in which a young male murder defendant, at the time of the crime, was going to school, working, and maintaining a busy social life. The young man might have been very sick inside, but on the outside, he appeared sane and functional. So, according to this attorney, it would have been hard to make an insanity defense work for him. It turns out that the boy’s attorney didn’t go that route.

--Because of this narrow definition of legal insanity and, practically, what will work in the courtroom, defense attorneys rarely attempt insanity pleas, and insanity defenses rarely succeed.

--Remember "diminished capacity?" Defendants in California used to be able to use this as a defense. It didn't totally excuse the defendant for a crime, like the insanity defense. Rather, it allowed a defendant to present evidence of a mental illness to ask a jury to reduce the charge to a lesser defense. Like from murder to manslaughter, as was the case with former San Francisco Supervisor Dan White, whom a jury convicted of voluntary manslaughter, rather than murder in the 1978 killings of Major George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.

That case helped spur Californians in 1982 to vote to abolish the "diminised capacity" defense, and the state to tighten its rules surrounding the insanity defense.

--The death penalty is supposedly designed to punish the worst of the worst. Yeah, maybe. Meanwhile, the insanity defense is designed for … Well, not necessarily the sickest of the sick, but those who are sick and who can meet a specific legal definition.

*****

There is no doubt that Phillip Garrido is one strange, “sick” human being. But I don’t see him being able to meet that legal definition of insanity.

I don’t see him being able to say “I’m not guilty because I was insane.” (I don't see Nancy Garrido being able to do that either.)

A successful NGI plea would spare him a sentence to state prison and result in an indefinite stay in a state hospital. But again, I don’t see that happening—in my humble opinion. Again, attorneys, forensic experts tell me if I'm wrong on this.

With Garrido, as much as he expressed a “crazy” and “insane” view of religion and his relationship with God, he essentially functioned in life, albeit in his “Creepy Phil” way. He maintained his business and ongoing relationships with clients, and seemed to—ugh—take care of his family and feed and clothe his captive and the daughters he bore with her. He even took his two daughters out and about in public, on his “Creepy Phil” religious missions and to at least one birthday party.

I doubt it would be hard to show that Garrido knew that kidnapping and raping Jaycee Dugard, and holding her captive for 18 years, was wrong. He seems to have expressed remorse and acknowledged a need to change at various points in his long criminal history, which includes a prior conviction for rape and kidnapping. Oh, he might have experienced times when he was able to convince himself and tried to convince others that he was somehow doing something good by keeping Jaycee as his hidden “sex slave.” But such expressions of his amazing feats of goodness probably aren’t a sign of delusional thinking so much as evidence of consciousness of guilt, premeditation, and an amazing capacity for self-justification.

Garrido will probably receive a decent defense attorney, given that he’s a high-profile client. Hmm. I wonder if one of those lawyers who love to see and hear themselves on TV (fill in a name) will offer to take on Garrido’s case pro bono. But if Garrido’s alleged crimes are too much for even a Mark Geragos to tackle, Garrido will probably be assigned the best public defender or court-appointed attorney that El Dorado County can offer, and that attorney will no doubt ask for a psychiatric evaluation, just in case he or she can find something in Garrido’s psychological history to use in his defense.

But I can’t see that lawyer using any poor Phil stories as a way to prove insanity and excuse him of criminal responsibility. My bet is that the attorney would, at the most, try to use any evidence of mental illness as a mitigating factor to win a reduced sentence. If such a reduction is even possible, given the charges Garrido is facing.

Then again, I don’t think there’s anything Garrido will be able to say to “mitigate” what he is so far accused of doing, or of crimes we might not yet know about.