Circuity Judge Terence Perkins today ordered a neuropsychological evaluation of Charles Kidd Jr., the 85-year-old former resident of Blare Drive in Palm Coast’s Woodlands accused of murdering 36-year-old Mark Ruschmeier in August.
Ruschmeier and his mother Brigitte Ruschmeier were living with Kidd at the house at 20 Blare Drive at the time. Kidd faces a second-degree murder charge, which carries a minimum mandatory sentence of 25 years on conviction. He has pleaded not guilty.
In mid-October Assistant Public Defender Larry Avallone filed a “suggestion of incompetency” after Kidd was evaluated by Dr. Tracey Henley, a neuropsychologist, receiving a written report on Oct. 13 that “indicated that [Kidd] was incompetent to proceed.
Assistant State Attorney Jennifer Dunton, who is prosecuting the case, today asked for a court-ordered second evaluation. Perkins, at her suggestion, appointed Dr. Jason Demery of Gainesville, who will be new to this court.
Avallone initially objected to the state’s choice, claiming Dunton had already consulted with Demery. Reading from emails forming the substance of her contact with Demere, Dunton told the judge that the exchanges were exclusively about whether the neuropsychologist could be available. “I shared zero facts about this case,” Dunton said, other than the case number. Avallon conceded.
Kidd was in court today. He’s been held at the county jail on no bond, and his attorney has not motioned for a bond hearing to perhaps set a bond that Kidd could post. Kidd stood alongside Avallon at the lectern in front of the judge.
“Mr Kidd, do you understand what we’re talking about?” Perkins, his voice rising a few decibels from how he’d been addressing the attorneys, asked him.
“Yes, sir,” Kidd said without hesitating.
The judge explained the appointment of the neuropsychologist, and that Kidd would have to sit through an evaluation.
“Do you have any problem talking to them when they come?” Perkins asked.
“No, sir.”
The evaluation already conducted suggests Kidd is suffering from a “neurocognitive disorder,” according to the defense. That’s the medical term for dementia, which is often–but not always accurately–equated with Alzheimer’s. Dementia impairs memory, judgment and perspective, though there is a broad range in the way it presents and evolves.
Both Brigitte Ruschmeier and Kidd called 911 after the shooting, and deputies arrived there not long after it. Kidd followed all commands, surrendering to deputies. He remembered being in a physical fight with Mark but told deputies he couldn’t recall what about or where he’d put the gun afterward. He did remember shooting Mark–and that Mark was unarmed the whole time.
Should the case go to trial, the prosecution’s main witness would be Brigitte, who reached for her phone to call 911 when the two men were struggling–she’d heard her son telling Kidd to get off him as they wrestled in the bathroom–but she heard two gunshots before she dialed, then saw Kidd walk within view of her and tell her: “He got what he deserved.”
If the second neuropsychologist were to agree with the first, Kidd would be committed to a state hospital, but the hospital would be required to attempt to restore him to competency. Absent a plea, the aim is always to try the case. With dementia, that goal is more uncertain. If the two evaluations disagree, it will be up to Perkins to decide which way to go.
The next pre-trial in the case is scheduled for Jan. 24. The results of the competency evaluation are expected beforehand, and could prompt a hearing to decide next steps.
Days after Kidd’s incarceration, the Blare Drive house was again a police scene after a resident still living there was alarmed by a crate full of what was reported to be grenades. After a tense afternoon and a bomb squad investigating, the crate proved to have contained ammunition, but not grenades. Kidd had spent a career in the Coast Guard.
Concerned Citizen says
The mental health card always seems to get thrown pretty quick these days. Don’t want to be held accountable? There’s about Five Thousand “disorders” you could be labeled with.
If he in fact made those comments after the shooting, why is it only a second-degree murder charge? Sounds like he knew what he was doing. An angry old white man with a gun. Looking for a reason to use it.
Ray W. says
Just be patient, Concerned Citizen.
I have spent a modest amount of time representing clients in front of Judge Perkins. He is a competent and able judge who presented to me as fair and impartial; he possesses enough experience to handle issues like this.
I first met Jarry Avallone when he was a prosecutor assigned to Judge Hudson’s docket in DeLand some 13 years ago. He was then and remains today a competent and able advocate, with enough experience to represent Mr. Kidd.
I spent a number of years opposing Mrs. Dunton on various homicide cases throughout the circuit. She too is a competent and able advocate, with enough experience to represent the State in this case.
Mr. Kidd, being 85 years old, requires evaluation by neuropsychologists, instead of psychologists, because the only evaluative tools approved for us in determining competency for people in his age group cannot be administered by psychologists; it takes additional training and experience to administer such tests, and the American Psychological Association requires their administration by neuropsychologists, and more particularly, neuropsychologists where are certified in the field of elder dementia.
All told from reading the article, it seems like everything necessary to make a proper determination of competency to stand trial is taking place in the fullness of time. If three people who possess more experience than you, who are better educated than you, and who very well might be smarter than you, take all the appropriate steps and Judge Perkins finds Mr. Kidd competent to stand trial, you get to tell all FlaglerLive readers that you were right. If, however, Judge Perkins finds from all the evidence presented to him that Mr. Kidd is incompetent to stand trial due to some form of dementia, you get to apologize to all FlaglerLive readers that you were wrong.
As an aside, if Mr. Kidd is determined to be incompetent to stand trial by reason of dementia, he can’t be found not guilty by reason of insanity, because he cannot go to trial. In an oddity, when I last handled one of these cases, I learned that our legislature, for whatever reason, had not then defined dementia in the chapter pertaining to mental illness and intellectual disability. There was at that time no framework available to a judge to legally resolve a homicide case involving late onset dementia. The Department of Children and Families vainly sought placement in approximately 200 assisted living facilities that were certified to handle dementia patients; none would accept my client. Eventually, the Department of Children and Families allowed her to be placed in a facility located on the state mental hospital grounds that housed female inmates over 60 who had developed mental illnesses. The facility had specialized doctors and nurses to care for the mentally ill. My client, who was nearly 98 when she was sent to the facility, eventually died there, but at least she wasn’t housed in the county jail, which is not the appropriate place to house those who cannot be tried, cannot be released, and cannot ever be restored to competency, because dementia is a non-restorable condition. We can’t even slow it down right now, though certain recently approved and controversial drugs show a modicum of progress on that front. Unfortunately, at the time of my client’s case, the Department of Corrections lacked a facility for men over the age of 60 who had developed mental illnesses during their prison terms.
In summary, I call this case a win-win situation for you, because if you are right you get to brag and if you are wrong, you just might become better educated about the court system at the end of the process.
Concerned Citizen says
Ray W,
I always look forward to your reply. You have a way of making us all feel like you are the most Educated Person in the world. And we are nothing but knuckle draggers.
I know you don’t care for us types. But I wore a badge for a lot of years. I worked both the road and investigations. Even had to pull a thankless tour in IAD. Then I married a career nurse who didn’t want to be married to a cop. And I saw the light and moved to Fire Rescue where I would retire as a Lieutenant.
In my tenure as a Deputy Sheriff, I interacted a lot with Perps, The DA and Judges. Some I had respect for. Some not so much. But I gained a lot of education on the inner workings of our justice system. There were times when you had the case airtight. And were hoping the Judge would max a sentence out. So, the victim might see justice. But then along comes someone more interested in a plea and clearing calendars. And well it just didn’t make sense to be in the line of work you were in.
I understand you were a defense attorney. All cops are bad. And all perps are not guilty. But sometimes there comes that one person that just gets away with it. But just because we don’t like it doesn’t mean we aren’t educated.
As far as your admiration for Perkins I’ll still hold my opinion. And let you have yours. The wonderful thing about our country is we don’t have to hold the same views.
Ray W. says
The main problem with your original post (other than your palpable disgust) is that your comment reveals that you are more than willing to override the individual right of any defendant to have his case evaluated by a neutral and detached magistrate. Procedural due process is defined as notice and a right to be heard. You would deny him that right to be heard. His attorney filed a motion with the court to decide the issue. You immediately derided that position. If after 31 years of service as a law enforcement officer you still do not understand how the court system works and why our founding fathers refused to give you the power to decide the outcome of criminal cases, when will you? Yes, my seven years as a prosecutor and four years of one of the circuit’s chief prosecutors taught me to greatly respect the many excellent law enforcement officers with whom I closely worked. However, I quickly began to recognize those few law enforcement officers who were simply not cut out for the job.
Gain perspective, get better at what you want to comment upon, improve yourself. Deriding an 85-year-old defendant who very well might be suffering from one or another of the many forms of dementia, after a neuropsychiatrist evaluated him, casts you in a less than illuminating light. You act as if you know what you are talking about. As I learned the hard way decades ago as a prosecutor, one must always consider the source before relying on the testimony.
For 30 years I traveled with a deputy to racetracks all across the country. At times I was a prosecutor. At other times I was a defense attorney. I was in law school when my brother and I recruited him to be the third rider on our privateer endurance team for a six-hour endurance race. We finished fifth in a field of forty teams in the Middleweight class, behind a semi-factory Honda team and three Yamaha semi-factory bikes that were bought in Canada, as the bikes were illegal here, except for racing purposes. We were the fastest privateer team on my stock Suzuki 550. An enduring friendship ensued. I eventually served as his crew chief in 23 editions of the Daytona 200. We won an AMA national endurance race, were Yamaha US supported in the endurance series for a number of years and finished fifth in the Heavyweight class points standings one year racing in 9 of the 14 events. Always underfunded, we still had a great time. Throughout it all, we talked about his experiences as a deputy and my experiences as a lawyer. When he retired, he moved from Miami to Port Orange, just a few miles from my home. We continued our friendship until his death at the speedway when he was struck from behind by a student he was teaching (he led the Suzuki school for beginning riders at the speedway twice a year). Both riders died. At the time, we had been going out to dinner each Tuesday night, a tradition we started when our wives bowled in a lady’s league on that night. Every once in a while, he would descend into a rant in the restaurant about how Miami was the hostility black hole of the universe, how we had lost the war, how bad things were. I would calmly touch his shoulder and tell him that it took 25 years for him to get to this point and that it would take 25 years to bring him back and that I was a patient man. He would apologize and we would go back to eating dinner and talking about life. On the Tuesday before he died, one of us could not make the dinner (I just don’t remember who). We talked for a time. He commented that he was the happiest he had ever been in his life. He had been hired a few months earlier by the speedway as a part-time photographer. He had just received his first social security check. He had divorced his wife who had descended into meanness whenever she drank (after the divorce, she repeatedly struck me as I drove her to a friend’s home after she had become too drunk to drive during a dinner at my home, it was the last time she ate at my home). He was mowing his grass, working on furnishing his home, hosting events, doing the little things that can fill a semi-retired life. His life was moving on after law enforcement and racing. But he still wanted to run the Suzuki school later that week. Then came the painful news. The loss of a 31-year friendship that defied your squalid view of life. I have seen the best of law enforcement and I have witnessed law enforcement officers admit under oath that they had lied to the court. One deputy in a first-degree murder case repeatedly admitted under oath (somewhere around 10 times) that so much of what he had just told the jury during direct examination by the prosecution was “garbage.”
I know of your suffering. I know of the trauma you experienced. I know of your hatreds. For 30 years, I listened to it all while traveling to Minnesota, to New Hampshire, to Arizona, to Tennessee, to a couple of tracks in Georgia, to Alabama, to Wisconsin, to North Carolina, and to a couple of tracks in Florida. Bad sergeants, bad policies, responding to domestic violence calls, fellow deputies leaving food in the randomly assigned shared cruisers before the agency bit the bullet and assigned individual cruisers to each deputy. Cleaning up after transporting defendants. Arresting a juvenile at a festival who was out of control (roid rage?) a few years before the man became an MLB star as a home run hitter in the era before greater emphasis on drug testing. Shooting a bullet into the ground so that he wouldn’t be assigned to write the incident report in a chaotic case that had spun out of control. Responding to a scene and standing for six hours on the perimeter without taking a bathroom break to write names and times on a piece of paper. And on and on.
Again, please do better when composing your comments. Please focus on inferences and how they can be abused. We have a constitution for a reason. Accept it in all its successes and failures.
Concerned Citizen says
I stand before you suitably shamed.
I will henceforth moving forward make sure I agree with all your views. Otherwise I find myself an ignorant uneducated excuse of a fellow being. Not entitled to have opposing views of others.
Ray W. says
Back to the basics.
As a very green misdemeanor prosecutor, I was with two fellow prosecutors in a Manatee County courtroom when news that a trooper had been murdered on I-75 just west of Bradenton swept through the courthouse. The initial word was that the trooper had radioed in that he was checking out a disabled car on the side of the highway. One of the division’s secretaries was married to a trooper. All of us wondered if her husband was the deceased trooper.
Hours later, we returned to the office to see her visibly angry husband standing by his wife’s desk. I entered my office, listening as he loudly expressed what he was thinking. He culminated his thoughts by prophesying that a particular K-9 deputy had better never call for assistance, because no officer would ever come to his aid. This announcement came moments after he told his wife that the K-9 deputy, who had taken the murder suspect into custody after finding him deep in the woodlands near his disabled car, had prevented the trooper from murdering the suspect. The trooper had heard that the suspect had been found and had raced into the woods intending to kill the suspect.
Weeks later, in a group conversation, the prosecutor handling the case stated that the K-9 deputy had been forced to draw his service weapon to hold off the arriving troopers; he repeatedly told them he would not lie for them. The troopers eventually backed away, frustrated in the inability to commit murder. That prosecutor said that part of the incident was not in the police reports.
If anyone thinks this episode did not affect my perspectives on who I should trust when I called a witness to the stand, they are greatly mistaken. I heard a husband angrily tell his wife that he had sought to commit premeditated murder that very morning and I heard a husband angrily tell his wife that he intended in the future to abandon a fellow officer to whatever fate befell him because that deputy had stopped the murder from taking place by drawing his service weapon.
I always knew that the vast majority of law enforcement officers were and are honest to their oath to uphold the Constitution and that I could rely on them when I sought to convict defendants of crimes that the defendants had committed. But I also knew that every day, someone, whether a lay witness or victim or a law enforcement officer, would try to use me to hurt someone else. I had to be careful with the power delegated to me. Blindly prosecuting people on the word of any individual can lead to wrongful convictions. As an aside, Florida leads the nation in death penalty exonerations, with 30 people having been released from death row since 1976. We have one federal and 50 state constitutions for many differing and important reasons, not least of which is that if we were to ever allow investigating officers and presenting prosecutors to decide who was guilty of crimes, we would suffer from many more wrongful convictions that we currently unearth today.
I eventually returned to Volusia County and interviewed with Stephen Boyles, the elected state attorney at the time. The only legal question he asked was whether I knew the progression of the legal reasoning behind the line of Supreme Court cases that culminated in the extension of the exclusionary rule to state law enforcement officers in 1964 in Mapp v. Ohio. I did and explained to Mr. Boyles that in 1914, the Supreme Court held it was violative of the 4th Amendment for a law enforcement officer to illegally search a person or place or to illegally seize one’s papers. Obvious to me at the time, and still today, the Supreme Court took oaths of office seriously. Some 34 years later, the Supreme Court created a remedy for the repeated violations of the Constitution by federal law enforcement officers and announced the exclusionary rule that forbad prosecutors from attempting to introduce into evidence any illegally seized statements, property or papers. Prosecutors are supposed to be the gatekeepers of all state evidence that is presented to a court. I have read court opinions that decry the perception that prosecutors no longer act as gatekeepers of obviously illegally seized evidence; instead, they pass the burden onto judges to act as the necessary gatekeepers. Prosecutors in my early years were to be the initial check and balance on law enforcement officers, not judges.
As an important and admittedly lengthy aside, years ago and very early in the representation of a murder defendant, I obtained a recording of a lengthy interrogation of the then-suspect, during which session the defendant repeatedly and unequivocally invoked his right to counsel. I immediately called the prosecutor. She acknowledged that she had started to listen to the recording. She added that upon hearing the first unequivocal invocation, she immediately stopped listening to the interrogation. She explained that she was in the process of preparing the case for presentation to a grand jury; she stopped because she did not want to taint her understanding of the facts by any inferences that might be drawn from knowing of the illegally obtained evidence, as she feared the taint might slip into her presentation to the jurors. She wanted, from my understanding, to avoid any possibility that any juror might be swayed by inadmissible evidence. She said that after the presentation to the jurors, she would come back to the recording and listen to it the rest of the way through in hopes of finding some way to be able to argue to a judge that the evidence obtained might be legally admissible. This is perhaps one of the best examples of the highly coveted virtuous prosecutor, acting as a gatekeeper of evidence, that our founding fathers hoped would be created by the ratification of our Constitution, but our founding fathers also knew that many other less virtuous people would swear oaths to uphold the Constitution and then violate their oaths at whim and caprice. The lesser among us are the reason why we have checks and balances for every power that the people delegated to government under the Constitution.
Back to the exclusionary remedy. Some 16 years later, and roughly 50 years after its initial ruling, the Supreme Court extended the exclusionary rule to apply to all state officers, via the 14th Amendment. What that should tell every FlaglerLive readers is that our Supreme Court provided 50 years notice to all law enforcement officers to follow the dictates of the Constitution. When officers repeatedly proved that they were not capable of following their oaths of office, the Supreme Court took away from prosecutors the ability to introduce illegally obtained evidence into a trial record. It has been 59 years since the issuance of Mapp v. Ohio and 109 years from the issuance of the first opinion. In those 59 years of excluding evidence under the remedy no prosecutor has ever been able to prove to a judge that police officers are now capable of consistently following the Constitution on their own two feet. If prosecutors were ever able to prove that premise, the exclusionary remedy would no longer be needed.
It should also be obvious to all FlaglerLive readers that in 1986 our elected state attorney made sure that I, as a prospective prosecutor, understood the importance of the progression of the exclusionary remedy in the law and that, by inference, he expected us all to follow the law. I was told by a senior prosecutor that Mr. Boyles asked every prospective prosecutor to explain to his satisfaction the progression of the exclusionary remedy.
I soon progressed to a DeLand misdemeanor docket alongside another young prosecutor who practiced in front of a different judge. My fellow prosecutor picked a jury in a DUI prosecution one Monday morning. His lead witness, a trooper out of the DeLand division, had arrested the defendant. On trial morning, the lead witness failed to appear to testify. The judge declared a mistrial and reset the trial, pending the inevitable jeopardy motion, as the jury had been sworn. The trooper, at the contempt of court hearing, testified under oath that the prosecutor had released him from the trial subpoena. The prosecutor said he did no such thing, though he conceded he had talked to the trooper about a scheduled seminar that the trooper had sought to attend for many years. If he missed it, the trooper would go back to the end of the line; he might not again be selected for the seminar for years and years. At that time, certain FHP seminars carried financial bonuses for completing; this was one of them. As I recall the facts, by completing the seminar, the trooper was to receive a $100 per month raise to his salary, which meant that all COLA adjustments would include that sum in their calculations for the rest of the trooper’s career and retirement. At the time, inflation was still quite high during the latter years of the Reagan administration; we were all receiving COLA raises twice per year. The trial judge found that the trooper had not been released from his subpoena and held him in contempt of court. A few days later, I was talking with a very trustworthy deputy (one of the best I ever worked with – Dominic Amendolare); he told me that he was glad his case was assigned to me as he didn’t like the other prosecutor, whom he called “dishonest.” I went back to the office and begged my fellow prosecutor to seek a transfer to another county in the circuit, as he was about to be ruined in Volusia County. I told him he had no idea of what was about to happen to him. My fellow prosecutor refused, as was his right, my advice and warning. Within about a year, he was an assistant public defender in St. Augustine; he never returned to Volusia County.
Concerned Citizen, please reread your first comment in this thread.
You announced your antipathy to the process of a defendant who seeks through his attorney to have a judge determine upon receipt of competent and reliable evidence from as many as two neuropsychologists who are qualified to use certain evaluative tools whether dementia exists and, if it does, whether it impairs the defendant to the point of incompetency. A right to a fair trial is a constitutional right long recognized in the law. An incompetent person may not be able to participate in any meaningful way in preparing or presenting his defense, if any.
I called you out on your obvious desire to deny a person a constitutional right. You responded not by accepting the wrongfulness of your position, but by announcing your personal reservations about the qualities of the presiding judge, by listing your years of service, and by attacking the messenger. There is no argument available to you in a liberal democratic Constitutional republic that allows you to prevail in denying anyone a constitutional right to a fair trial. You might win in an authoritarian society, but not in ours as it exists today. And you continued your wrongful attacks in later comments. You miss the point. I am not right. The Constitution is right. It is not an issue of me attacking you, it is you who is leaving yourself defenseless. You were wrong and made your error worse by claiming that you at one time had sworn an oath to uphold our Constitution.
One of several main themes from my earliest comments is that years ago I read of President Putin’s interview with a Financial Times reporter, during which interview he expressed his opinion that “liberalism” had become “obsolete.” At that time, EU President Tusk responded to Putin’s comment by asserting that if liberalism had indeed become obsolete, then the rule of law is obsolete, individual rights are obsolete, and freedom is obsolete.
Thus, a number of years ago, Putin announced to the world his belief that the age of democracies is coming to an end and that the age of autocracy is to reign supreme. We are seeing the results of this mindset. All around the world, the rule of law means nothing to those who desire rule by despotism or tyranny. There are demagogues among us all. Right now, I oppose you. I will always oppose those like you who denigrate those who seek to uphold the Constitution. Stand true to your original oath and I will wholeheartedly support you in everything you argue. Stop trying to undermine or lessen the value of our Constitution. Engage in reasoned discourse. Follow reason to whatever end it leads you.
Don’t contort reason to fit a preconceived result.
CELIA PUGLIESE says
Totally agree with Concerned Citizen I could not have written it any better!