#insanity-defense

#insanity-defense

Jurors who just convicted a 34-year-old man of bludgeoning and stabbing his parents and a longtime housekeeper to death inside their home in a gated Newport Beach community will now have to decide whether the defendant was legally insane at the time of the slayings. The sanity phase of Camden Burton Nicholson's special circumstances murder trial began on Thursday, Oct. 23 and will ultimately determine whether Nicholson will spend the rest of his life in state prison,

During opening statements on Monday in a Santa Ana courtroom, Senior Deputy District Attorney David Porter told an Orange County Superior Court jury that Nicholson, then 27, used a variety of knives and other blunt instruments to bludgeon and stab his mother and father to death, to do the same to Morse the next day. A day later he turned himself in, the prosecutor said, and claimed he carried out the killings in self-defense.