The Brooklyn druggie who killed four people in a rampage boasted to a cop that he’d beat the rap with an insanity defense, prosecutors revealed Tuesday.
“It’s okay, I’ll beat this,” Maksim Gelman told an officer before his arraignment in February, according to court papers.
“I’ll go to a mental hospital for a few years and then I’ll get out on the street again, you’ll see.”
The bluster became public as a shaggy-bearded Gelman, 23 pleaded not guilty to four counts of murder in Brooklyn Supreme Court.
He’s charged with killing his stepfather, a female acquaintance and her mother, and a pedestrian during a bloody spree that included three carjackings and the stabbing of a subway rider.
He was nabbed with a bloody knife, three razor blades, a paring knife and $932, documents show.
As cops drove him from Manhattan to a Brooklyn stationhouse, he told a detective: “Please just kill me now.”
Other rambling remarks he made – describing his rampage as “a doozy of a day” and claiming he had cancer – were previously made public.
His comment about an insanity gambit came as an officer handed him over to the Corrections Department and wished him “good luck.”
Gelman spent most of his time after that in the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital Center but has since been transferred to Rikers Island.
He “seems to be in a somewhat precarious emotional condition right now,” defense lawyer Edward Friedman told the judge, describing his client’s “fragile mental state.”
The defendant, a graffiti vandal, said nothing during the brief hearing, sitting shackled in an orange jumpsuit, surrounded by five court officers. He’s due back in court June 7.
(Source: NY Daily News)
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4 Responses
If found not guilty be reason of insanity, one remains incarcerated until “cured.” Given that real insanity is incurable, it amounts to a life sentence – and with fewer rights than prisoners have. He would be better off aiming for concurrent life sentences with the possibility of parole at some point in his life.
Oh yeah, in this country, he’ll get his way out…
If this loser thinks he’s going to get away with this, he really is insane!
Seriously, the insanity defense rarely succeeds, due to reforms instituted after the Hinckley trial. It’s even less likely to succeed where the accused lets the cat out of the bag that he plans to use this defense to get off scott free!
This is where the death penalty makes sense.