Early one summer morning, Weymouth Police Sergeant Michael Chesna responded to a minor vehicle accident near South Shore Hospital. Minutes later, he was shot and killed with his own gun. Police arrested Emanuel Lopes, charging the Brockton resident not only with Chesna’s murder — but also that of Vera Adams, a 77-year-old bystander who was shot while on her porch.
That all transpired five years ago this week. But it wasn’t until last month that Lopes went on trial.
Testimony wrapped up in late June and, so far, jury deliberations have gone on for five days. The panel had the weekend off but will resume work on the case Monday.
Lopes’s lawyers don’t dispute their client fatally shot Chesna and Adams — but they say he has a long history of mental illness — including auditory hallucinations and incidents of self-harm. Lopes is now 25-years-old, but defense attorneys say his struggles with mental illness stretch back to his teen years.
Will the jury buy an insanity defense? Odds are they won’t. One study from 1991, still cited today, found the insanity defense was used in only about one percent of criminal proceedings — and successfully in just a quarter of that one percent.
“People are very rarely found ‘not guilty’ by reason of insanity,” said Peter Elikann, a criminal defense attorney in Boston and a Boston 25 legal analyst. “You really have to show that somebody is very, very mentally ill. Not just a little bit. They (the jury) almost wants to see a person that’s delusional, drooling, completely out of it.”
That is not how Emanuel Lopes has appeared thus far. In fact, he has mostly sat through the proceedings emotionless.
If the jury can’t come to an agreement the judge will have no choice but to declare a mistrial — but she’s encouraged jurors to keep working together to, one way or another, close out this case.