Read Online The Man in the Monster by Martha Elliott - Free Book Online Page B

issue. All I was interested in was proving my case. I didn’t care about the penalty phase. . . . I wanted to prove to people that I didn’t have control over what I did and that maybe I needed to be locked up, but I’m not a criminal. And that’s all I cared about. So, now I’m a criminal, andall we’re deciding is what punishment I’m going to have. See what I’m saying? To me there’s not a hell of a lot of difference.” He said he would have been happy with a verdict of “insane, but fry him anyway.” Living wasn’t the issue. Making people understand was all he cared about.
    He thought for a moment and then continued to try to make me understand. “They were laughing in the jury room. I heard them. I knew they were coming out. I could hear them laughing in there when they brought me back up. You know, it was a joke to them,” he said, his voice cracking. “And it didn’t take them very long to convict me—eighty-seven minutes. And it took them less than a day to give me the death penalty. It was all a big joke.” I was beginning to understand why he thought the criminal justice system was stacked against him.
    â€œBut this time Dr. Miller’s letter will come in as evidence,” I said, referring to the evidence that had been withheld from the jury in the first trial—the fact that even the state’s own psychiatric witness confirmed Michael’s mental illness and agreed that he should not be given a death sentence.
    â€œIt’s not important. You know what’s not important? Justice is not important. Perceived justice is important. If I got sent down to Whiting, it would be in all the newspapers about how I beat the system and how this murderer should have gotten the death penalty,” he said, sounding defeated. He was also pouting by this point, feeling sorry for himself that he would be condemned no matter how his case came out—either condemned to death or condemned as a fraud.
    â€œYou truly don’t care whether you live or die?”
    â€œIf they came to me and said, we’ll give you a life sentence, no more hearings or anything, then great, that would be fine. I can live with that.” He mused that he might be able to get a teaching job in the prison school as a tutor because of his college degree—if he ever got off death row into general population. “I could make something out of my life,but I’m not going to fight for that if I know I’m going to hurt other people” he said, referring to the victims’ families.
    â€œDo you know what it’s like to wake up in the morning and be sad that God didn’t take you during the night? That’s how I feel every day.” I couldn’t imagine.
    As I delved deeper into his case, Michael Ross made even less sense to me. He wanted to expose the flaws in the criminal justice system that led to his being put on death row, but he didn’t want to do it to get off death row. He didn’t care if he was executed. He just wanted people to believe that he was mentally ill, a sexual sadist, and that he couldn’t control his impulses to rape and murder.
    Â â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢Â 
    S exual sadism was not a psychological disorder with which I was familiar, so I needed a medical expert who had studied Michael to explain the mental illness. At least five psychiatrists had evaluated Michael before his first trial, one for the prosecution and four for the defense. All had agreed that he was a sexual sadist.
    I contacted Dr. Fred Berlin, who was the chief defense witness for Michael Ross during the penalty phase of the trial. He heads the National Institute for the Study, Prevention and Treatment of Sexual Trauma at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and is a widely renowned expert on paraphiliac disorders that include sexual sadism. He is also the doctor who prescribed Michael’s medication after he