Courthouse shooter's fate in jury's hands

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- Jurors on Friday began a second day of deliberations in the capital murder trial of a man accused of escaping from custody and killing four people, three of them at an Atlanta, Georgia, courthouse.

Jurors are deciding the fate of Brian Nichols, 36, who faces 54 charges including murder, kidnapping, robbery and escape in the March 2005 rampage that began at the Fulton County Courthouse.

Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against Nichols, who has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

He is accused of overpowering Fulton County sheriff's deputy Cynthia Hall on March 11, 2005, as he was being led into a courtroom where he was facing a second trial on rape charges.

Officials say he took Hall's gun from a lockbox and fatally shot three people at the courthouse: Fulton County Superior Court Judge Rowland Barnes, court reporter Julie Ann Brandau and Fulton County sheriff's Sgt. Hoyt Teasley, who attempted to apprehend him outside the building.

Nichols is also charged with killing David Wilhelm, a federal customs agent, hours later at Wilhelm's home in the Buckhead section of Atlanta.

He was arrested in suburban Gwinnett County 26 hours after his escape, where authorities say he held a woman hostage in her apartment, following the largest manhunt in Georgia history, one that triggered panic in the Atlanta area.

Prosecutors have said Nichols confessed to the shootings shortly after his arrest. The defense has not disputed whether he was the gunman, focusing instead on his mental state and claiming he suffers from a disorder that "overmastered" his will to refrain from criminal acts.

The jury is made up of five African-American women, two white women, three African-American men, a white man and an Asian-American man, court officials said. Their options are to convict Nichols, find him guilty but mentally ill, acquit him or find him not guilty by reason of insanity.

If Nichols is convicted, the penalty phase of the trial will begin immediately, according to Fulton County courts spokesman Don Plummer. In that phase, jurors would hear impact statements from the victims' relatives and decide whether to spare Nichols' life.

Nichols' trial has been plagued by delays. In October 2007, Judge Hilton Fuller of DeKalb County, who was appointed to hear the case, abruptly halted jury selection on what would have been its third day, accepting a defense motion to stop the trial until questions of funding for Nichols' lawyers were resolved.

In January, Fuller recused himself from the case after a New Yorker magazine article written by Jeffrey Toobin, who is also a CNN senior legal analyst, quoted him as saying the "only defense" open to Nichols was insanity, "because everyone in the world knows he did it."

Also in January, Nichols' defense attorneys said in court filings that they intended to utilize a mental-illness defense, claiming Nichols suffered from a "delusional compulsion" at the time of the slayings.

They said he has been diagnosed with a disorder that involves delusions of persecution, as well as grandiose thinking. Those suffering from such a disorder may function normally and behave rationally, defense attorneys said, but when they encounter circumstances that "touch their delusions, the delusional disorder will preoccupy them and instruct their thinking and actions."

The Gwinnett County woman Nichols was accused of taking hostage, Ashley Smith, has written a book and spoken publicly about how she kicked her addiction to methamphetamine after the ordeal. During their seven hours together, she has said, she gave Nichols drugs but refused to use them with him -- and has not used them since.

In a October 2005 appearance on CNN's "Larry King Live," Smith said she was able to gain Nichols' trust and persuade him to surrender quietly after reading passages to him from Rick Warren's best-selling book "The Purpose-Driven Life" and calling on God for help.

Smith, who has married and is now known as Ashley Smith Robinson, testified at Nichols' trial.

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