Yahoo! News/APCHARLESTON, S.C. - A 15-year-old boy who claimed the antidepressant Zoloft drove him to kill his grandparents was found guilty of murder Tuesday and sentenced to 30 years in prison.
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Defense attorneys had urged the jury to send a message to the nation by blaming Zoloft for the killings. They said the negative effects of Zoloft are more pronounced in youngsters, and the drug affected Pittman so he did not know right from wrong.
"We do not convict children for murder when they have been ambushed by chemicals that destroy their ability to reason," attorney Paul Waldner said.
But prosecutors called the Zoloft defense a smoke screen, saying the then-12-year-old Pittman knew exactly what he was doing three years ago when he shot his grandparents, torched their house and then drove off in their car.
Prosecutor Barney Giese said the real motivation for the crime was the boy's anger at his grandparents for disciplining him for choking a younger student on a school bus. And he reminded jurors how the boy carried out the killings shooting his grandfather in the mouth and his grandmother in her head while both lay sleeping.
"I don't care how old he is. That is as malicious a killing a murder as you are ever going to find," the prosecutor said. He pointed to Pittman's statement to police in which he said his grandparents "deserved it."
Pittman was charged as an adult in the November 2001 murders of Joe Pittman, 66, and his wife Joy, 62.
Damn.
According to CNN, the boy was a very disturbed individual. But it appears that he conceived the plan to exact retribution for his punishment (the warning from his grandfather to send him back to Florida).