Convicted Inmate to Drop Insanity Stand

Attorneys for a County Jail inmate once charged with the deaths of two inmates have decided to drop his insanity defense.

Jerry T. Pick, 27, was scheduled to be back before Superior Court Judge Robert R. Fitzgerald on Monday to begin a sanity hearing. But Pick attorney Milton C. Grimes said he and Pick’s family have agreed to gamble on sentencing by Fitzgerald, set for Feb. 16.

Pick could receive either probation or a sentence of 3, 6 or 11 years in state prison. But if the jury had found him insane, he could have been kept in a state mental hospital for the rest of his life.

“We believe that he should not receive the maximum sentence,” Grimes said. “This boy needs medical help, not a prison.”

Pick admitted that he was responsible for the strangulation death of inmate Arthur Oviedo when he was asleep in the jail medical ward cell they shared on Jan. 31, 1987. Pick also admitted that he had struck 73-year-old John Franklin Wilcox, another cellmate, two weeks earlier, just a few hours before Wilcox died of complications from pneumonia.

Jurors acquitted Pick in the Wilcox death, accepting Grimes’ argument that prosecutors failed to prove that the blow Pick delivered contributed to Wilcox’s death. The jury returned a voluntary manslaughter verdict in the Oviedo death.

Also on Monday, Fitzgerald found Pick guilty of purse-snatching, the charge which had landed him in County Jail. But any sentence related to that charge is expected to run concurrently with the manslaughter sentence.