Judge Jacquelyn Duffy found convicted murderer Stephen Deflaun to be sane when he shot and killed two people more than 20 years ago at Morro Strand State Beach campground.
“I do not find that defense has proven that Mr. Deflaun was legally insane,” Duffy announced to the courtroom. “I don’t think there is any question of whether he has a mental disease or defect. [It’s] whether he knew he was doing anything wrong.”
On July 8, 2001, Deflaun shot and killed campers Stephen Wells and his nephew Jerry Rios Jr., and then engaged in a shootout with Ranger Chuck Jackson on-site. He testified in April that voices from an entity called “the program” harassed him to kill Wells and Rios Jr.
The San Luis Obispo County Superior Court judge’s April 28 sanity phase verdict marked the end of Deflaun’s trial in which he was already found guilty of double murders in the first degree and of assaulting a law enforcement agent with a firearm.
Duffy added that her verdict rested on another “prong” too: whether Deflaun knew his actions were morally and legally wrong.
She buttressed that point with references from witness testimonies that Deflaun practiced daily target exercises to the point where he was adept with firearms, and that he described shooting 11-year-old victim Rios Jr. as a “lucky shot.” Further, looking away from Rios Jr. before shooting him showed “a twinge of conscience,” according to Duffy.
She’s scheduled to sentence Deflaun on June 2. Assistant District Attorney Eric Dobroth told New Times that Deflaun’s first degree murder charges could weigh 25 years to life for each offense, with an additional 10 years for the charge of assaulting an officer with a firearm.
“It would be a mandatory sentencing of life imprisonment without possibility of parole,” he said.
Dobroth led the prosecuting team in Deflaun’s trial. During closing arguments on April 28, Deputy District Attorney Ben Blumenthal mentioned the 2015 case of People v. Leeds where Santa Maria-based Lee Bedwell Leeds shot and killed his father and three other men. Leeds claimed that he hallucinated that the four men were “conspirators” who were plotting to kill him.
Leeds is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and—similar to Deflaun—entered pleas of not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity. The court concluded that Leeds was legally insane when he murdered the four people, but also found that the trial court made a mistake when it instructed the jury that the defendant’s beliefs had to be “reasonable” in order to claim self-defense.
“Three of the four victims were hunted down, and essentially, methodically executed,” Blumenthal told the court on April 28. “The mere fact that somebody suffers from a delusion … doesn’t give that person license to kill a person [they] believe will kill them.”
Blumenthal stated that all of Deflaun’s actions after he took the first shot at Wells couldn’t be classified as self-defense. In his trial testimony, Deflaun mentioned that the voices in his head led him to believe that Wells was an assassin sent to kill him. He tried to justify his shootings by saying he was protecting himself.
“It’s essentially a claim of duress,” Blumenthal said. “The law has long held that duress is simply not a defense.”
The deputy district attorney also tried to poke holes in expert testimonies from forensic psychologists whom the defense brought to the witness stand. The sanity phase of the trial was marked by opposing opinions from doctors about whether Deflaun understood right from wrong when he committed the crimes. Blumenthal focused on the evaluations done by Carolyn Murphy and Kevin Perry, two doctors who believed Deflaun found it difficult to understand his actions.
“Dr. Perry and Dr. Murphy didn’t have the benefit of hearing the defendant’s testimony,” Blumenthal said. “They weren’t here to witness the testimony about the shooting.”
He added that if Deflaun believed that “the program” and Wells were out to harm him in 2001, he never alerted people around him about it before or after the shooting.
“Both of the doctors were trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, and, frankly, both of them didn’t do a good job doing so,” Blumenthal said. Δ
This article appears in Best Of SLO County 2023.
