Attorney: Tests Show Brain Of Kaufman DA Killer "Is" Damaged
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NORTH TEXAS (CBSDFW.COM) - The attorney for convicted Kaufman County killer Eric Williams is asking for a new trial after receiving the results of a brain scan done on his client.
According to attorney John Wright, Williams' brain is damaged.
Earlier this month a judge agreed to have tests run to see if the rampage by the former Justice of the Peace was triggered by a damaged brain.
A member of the prosecution team told CBS 11 News, "I am sure there will be a motion for a new trial. There is always one filed in a death case and they may claim his brain has a problem. But I haven't seen the motion and we aren't worried about it when they file it."
It was just last month when Williams was sent to death row for killing Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLelland and his wife Cynthia.
When the CBS 11 I-Team first reported about the testing it was suggested lawyers were hoping results would show that health reasons, possibly caused by diabetes, drove Williams to kill the McLelland's the night before Easter Sunday 2013, just two months after Mike McLelland's top prosecutor, Mark Hasse, was gunned down as he walked to the county courthouse in Kaufman.
Wright says testing performed on Williams on January 8 at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston shows important brain damage.
Wright's motion includes information from a report by Neuroradiologist William W. Orrison Jr., that indicates Williams had probable prior brain injury.
"The hippocampus is part of limbic system that produced and regulates emotion. Eric's has broken, probably due to head trauma. The damage is at the interface between gray and white matter. This suggests brain damage causing Eric to have poor executive function that is supposed to regulate Eric's unregulated emotions coming from his shrunken and damaged hippocampus," Orrison's report states.
We'll have more on the filings made by lawyers and decisions from the court as they happen.
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