In June 2018, Jarrod Ramos entered a local newspaper office in Annapolis and shot five people to death. He was angry about a 2011 article that described his conviction for harassment.
In October 2019, Ramos pled guilty to 23 felony counts, including five counts of first-degree murder. However, he said he wasn't criminally responsible, which is Maryland's equivalent of an insanity plea.
If Ramos wasn't criminally responsible, he'd spend the rest of his life in a psychiatric facility. But to the families of those Ramos had killed, it was all about whether their loved ones would receive justice. They wanted Ramos in prison for life.
"You can look around and see there's a lot more than five [victims]," said the widow of a shooting victim. "There are a lot of people who couldn’t be here today because they have to choke on their own words when they talk about this horrific crime.”
In the jury trial that concluded yesterday, Ramos was found criminally responsible. It was a dramatic trial, with battling diagnoses of Ramos's personality problems that ranged from narcissism to autism to delusions.
The prosecution, however, had a celebrated court-ordered psychiatrist whose conclusion that Ramos knew what he was doing was backed up with a report detailing nearly two dozen reasons. One was that Ramos seemed to take pleasure in the killings. "There's no mental disorder that accounts for that," she said.
When the verdict was read after just two hours' deliberation, there was noticeable relief among the victims' families.
Ramos will be sentenced in September.
https://wtop.com/blog/2021/07/latest-updates-capital-gazette-newspaper-shooter-jarrod-ramos-on-trial/
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