Courtroom rampage trial begins

“It was a normal day of judicial proceedings,” prosecutor Kellie Hill told the jury Monday. “A regular day of courtroom tranquillity -- until that man walked in a back door.”

She pointed across the courtroom to the sullen, powerfully built man in a tan suit accused of killing four people in a 2005 rampage that started at a courthouse just a few blocks from here.

She then played an audiotape from the morning in March when he entered a courtroom with a gun shortly after having escaped from a sheriff’s deputy. The tape began with the sound of a lawyer arguing her case. There were two thunderous booms, then a wail that sounded like an air-raid siren.

The horror and pandemonium that engulfed Atlanta in 2005 was now flooding a courtroom in 2008. The victims’ relatives erupted in tears. There was an objection, and two packs of lawyers rushed the bench.

Brian Nichols’ trial had finally begun, after 3 1/2 years of delays and controversies.

Nichols, a computer engineer, made national news on March 11, 2005, when he gunned down a judge, a deputy and a court reporter in downtown Atlanta’s Fulton County Courthouse.

The gunman’s subsequent escape triggered the largest manhunt in Georgia history. During the next 26 hours, the gunman killed a federal agent and attempted to steal several cars.

The ordeal ended when a woman he kidnapped -- who placated him by reading him Christian self-help books -- escaped and called 911.

The courtroom was packed with victims’ survivors, as well as Nichols’ parents. Nichols has pleaded not guilty to all charges by reason of insanity. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.

The opening statements unfolded under heavy security. In 2005, Nichols, a former football player, had been awaiting trial in a rape case when he punched a 51-year-old female deputy in the face then fled with her gun.

On Monday, a male sheriff’s deputy who matched Nichols’ brawn stood facing the defendant about 6 feet away. Nichols sat flanked by his team of court-appointed lawyers, occasionally scribbling on a piece of paper.

The criminal trial, with its 54-count indictment including four murder charges, has become the most complex and expensive in Georgia history. Its cost -- currently in the millions of dollars -- has threatened to cripple the state’s indigent defense system. It has also sparked a fierce debate over how much should be spent on a man whose lawyers admit he is a killer.

On Monday, lead defense attorney Henderson Hill argued that Nichols should not be found guilty because he suffered from a “delusional disorder” that impaired his ability to know right from wrong.

Hill said that Nichols, who is African American, believed he was involved in an epic struggle to liberate black people. “In Brian Nichols’ war,” Hill said, “he believed that he was a slave rebelling against the United States government.”

“What you will see is that these delusions were real for Mr. Nichols,” Hill told the jury. “He believed in it as you believe that ice is cold, that night follows day.”

Prosecutor Hill, who is not related to the defense attorney, said the evidence would show that “there was one black person that he was trying to help that day. His mission was to help just one, and that was himself.”

Hill described Nichols’ actions as well-planned and orderly. He was being retried in a rape case that had resulted in a mistrial; she said that this time he knew things were not going as well for him.

“He knew he was going to be convicted, and in his mind he had nothing to lose,” she said.

Hill emphasized the human loss, revealing photos of the four victims one by one, telling their stories and describing the families they left behind.

Hill also played a taped jailhouse conversation Nichols had with his father in which he discussed the psychological tests he was undergoing and declared, “There ain’t nothing wrong with me.”

The case’s epic size and slow speed have frustrated Georgia’s Republican-controlled Legislature.

It has responded by cutting funding for the Georgia Public Defenders Standards Council, which coordinates representation of poor defendants. “In my opinion, the Nichols case has basically spelled the end of the public defenders system in the state,” Michael Mears, who retired as council director in 2007, said Monday.

In the courtroom, Judge James Bodiford seemed intent on moving the case forward after years of delay.

He said he hoped the trial would not last beyond late December.

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richard.fausset@latimes.com