Killer Instinct

The jurors had a question for Johnson: How does one go about constructing a professional opinion as to the sanity of someone during the commission of a crime if the evaluation doesn't occur until months or years later?

"It's a hard job," Johnson said, noting that you need to look at as much information as possible, including witness and police reports, social services records — "the whole ball of wax." Previously, though, Johnson had testified that he did not feel the need to get more information beyond that revealed by Tate in his interviews and in the 9,000 pages of documentation provided by the defense and prosecution — which he acknowledged that he had not read entirely.

The defense opened its case with Heather Beck, a mental-health worker whose interactions with Tate dated back to 1998, when the boy was ten. She testified that Tate was a loner, an expressionless kid who never seemed able to put any kind of plan into effect, never had friends.

Tate's body shook as he listened to Beck.

Then the defense called John Fitzgerald, Steve's brother. He testified that on at least two occasions, Michael Fitzgerald had threatened to murder his family — long before he'd ever met Michael Tate.

The next day, the jury heard more of Tate's horrifying early life. They learned that he was too young to speak when he started to display sexually aggressive behaviors toward others, an indication that he had been sexually molested. At the age of eight, he was hospitalized for banging his head. At twelve, he tried to kill himself by ingesting household cleaner.

On day ten, John Hardy, a licensed child psychologist, offered the jury his opinion of Tate's state of mind on the day of the murder. "Based upon Michael's history, I would predict that any time he is severely stressed, there would be a reasonable chance that he would have some kind of psychotic reaction," he testified. "His grasp on reality was very much slipping in the bedroom, but his ability to determine right from wrong was certainly gone by the time he was struck with the scooter in the garage."

Tate had told him he'd seen a demon lurking outside of Steve's bedroom window, that he'd seen red in the garage, and that after the murder he'd seen the Archangel and Satan fighting over Steve Fitzgerald's soul.

"'Psychotic,' 'delusional,' 'bizarre' — those are the words that you all have heard over and over in the past weeks of testimony regarding Michael Tate," defense attorney Shawna Geiger told the jury in her closing argument. "He is one of the sickest kids these doctors have ever seen. Michael Tate was fragile, broken and pieced back together in a way that never made sense."

On an overhead screen, she showed the names of 28 mental-health professionals who'd found Tate suffering from significant psychiatric problems — all lined up against Johnson, the state's star witness on the issue of Tate's sanity. "Not one of the professionals described him as normal, not one of the professionals can point to a time when Michael was well," Geiger said. "Dr. Johnson chose to ignore or discount every professional in those twenty volumes of records in order to endorse his own opinion."

Her next display was a PowerPoint presentation of Tate as a boy (they could find no family photos of him after he turned three). Geiger described him as a kid who couldn't follow instructions past one or two steps — which is all that Michael Fitzgerald would have needed to get someone else to do his dirty work.

"Michael Tate had nothing to pull him back to reality," she said. "He listened to the voices; he saw red." Geiger pleaded with the jury to find her client not guilty so that he would be sent to a psychiatric institution — not to prison, and definitely not back into the community.

But prosecutor Michelle Cantin got to have the last word.

"He liked satanism because he liked the evil," she told the jury. "Michael Tate wants you to put him in the state hospital, the same place that has determined that he is not insane, the same place that said that he is sane. Steven Fitzgerald does not have a voice in this courtroom. Steven Fitzgerald met the defendant one time — one time — and at the end, Steven Fitzgerald lay dead in his own garage. Steven Fitzgerald, as he lay dying on the ground on his back, was bludgeoned by the defendant five times in his face because the defendant is full of anger and hatred.

"He said he hates people. Maybe he has had an unfortunate life, and he can hate anyone he wants, but that does not excuse what he did."

For the first time in two and a half weeks of trial, after hearing close to fifty witnesses talk about his life and Steven Fitzgerald's death but never testifying himself, Michael Tate finally started crying.

During the trial, the jurors had been reminded not to read any coverage of the case. But other events kept echoing through the courtroom. While Johnson was on the stand, a CU freshman was stabbed on campus by a man who'd gotten off on an earlier charge with a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. The judge asked the jury if anyone had heard about the incident, and those jurors had promised it would not affect their judgment. A day later, Governor Bill Ritter established a seven-member clemency board to review clemency petitions filed by people sentenced as adults for crimes that they had committed as juveniles. Clemency is the only way that Michael Fitzgerald could possibly get out of jail before his 62-year sentence expires. And if the jury convicted Michael Tate of first-degree murder, clemency might be the only way he could ever hope to see daylight.