Murder trial with a ‘rarely invoked’ defense set to begin in Centre County. What to know
The trial for the man charged in the 2016 killing of a Pine Grove Mills woman is set to begin Monday, the latest chapter in one of Centre County’s most high-profile cases of the past decade.
Christopher Kowalski, 35, was arrested in February 2021 after telling investigators he killed Jean Tuggy, 60, inside her home because he was “depressed, down and hopeless.”
Kowalski said he killed Tuggy because she was an “easy target,” investigators wrote in an affidavit of probable cause. Ferguson Township police detective Caleb Clouse testified during a preliminary hearing that Kowalski said he killed Tuggy “in cold blood.”
“He also said he always wanted to be a gunslinger. He kind of admired people like Wyatt Earp and John Wayne,” Clouse testified during the March 2021 hearing. “He watched a lot of those movies and he always wanted to be a gunslinger and a lawman.”
The two were co-workers at a State College-area grocery store and developed a sexual relationship that Tuggy planned to end, investigators wrote. Tuggy died of a gunshot wound to the head.
Defense lawyer Thomas Egan III plans to mount an insanity defense, a rarely used strategy that three legal experts said is difficult to use successfully.
The defense is raised in less than 1% of felony cases nationwide, Penn State assistant law professor Jacob Schuman said. Of those limited cases, the defense is successful less than 25% of the time.
“Rarely invoked and rarely successful,” Schuman said. “The reason is that the bar is really high to show that you were legally insane.”
Added Christopher Slobogin, the director of Vanderbilt Law School’s criminal justice program: “Most people found insane are found insane because the prosecutor agrees they’re insane. ... If it goes to trial, it wins less than half the time. Juries are very skeptical about it.”
Kowalski has autism, chronic depression and grandiose delusional disorder. The conditions caused him to “labor under a defect of reason,” Egan wrote in a December 2021 notice to prosecutors.
Kowalski either didn’t know what he was doing was illegal or was incapable of obeying the law, Egan wrote. Kowalski’s parents and six medical professionals are among those who may testify in an attempt to establish the defense.
Juries, University of Baltimore law professor David Jaros said, are “remarkably reluctant” to find people not guilty by reason of insanity.
“This is not an easy defense to raise successfully. It’s not as if people are constantly getting off on what is viewed by some in the public as a technicality,” Jaros said. “Moreover, it’s not that someone who is found not guilty by reason of insanity just walks out of the courtroom and back into the public.”
Egan will have to show by a preponderance of the evidence that Kowalski was legally insane, Schuman said. The difference could between serving time in a state prison or a state hospital.
“If you’re sentenced to prison, you serve a prison sentence. You get out when your prison sentence is done,” Schuman said. “If you’re sent to a mental institution, you’re there until you’re judged safe and cured. How long is that? However long they decide it needs to be. It could be a week. It could be the rest of your life.”
One of the most high-profile criminal defendants to successfully argue they were insane is John Hinckley Jr., who attempted to assassinate then-President Ronald Reagan in 1981. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity in federal court and was released from psychiatric care in 2016.
Outrage over the finding led to the passage of a new law that made it harder to win a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity by lowering the standards of evidence for prosecutors to prove sanity.