Caro Drops Insanity Plea

One day after she was convicted of killing her three young boys, Socorro Caro dropped her bid to be found legally insane.

Caro’s surprise decision Tuesday means she has abandoned any possibility of being sent to a state mental hospital rather than prison. Instead, the 44-year-old Santa Rosa Valley woman will face either the death penalty or a life sentence without parole.

Accused of shooting her children as they slept, Caro was found guilty of three counts of first-degree murder. She had pleaded not guilty after the 1999 killings, but later amended that plea to not guilty by reason of insanity.

On Tuesday, Superior Court Judge Donald D. Coleman asked Caro numerous questions to make certain she recognized the consequence of withdrawing her insanity plea.

“You understand that if the jury were to conclude that you were insane, you wouldn’t be held criminally liable for the crimes,” Coleman said.

“I understand that,” Caro quietly responded.

Coleman also asked whether her lawyers had persuaded her to drop her plea.

“No sir,” she answered. “It’s voluntary.”

Pale and drawn, Caro appeared in court in a light-blue jail jumpsuit. Jurors, who had been told to return Wednesday for the start of the trial’s sanity phase, had the day off.

After the hearing, Assistant Public Defender Jean Farley reiterated that the decision was one that her client had come to on her own.

“I’m obviously disappointed,” said Farley, who argued Caro’s case during nine weeks of testimony.

If Caro had persisted with her insanity plea, her attorneys would have faced a difficult task.

During the trial, they argued that Caro was a loving mother and a rational woman--a wife who sent her physician husband reasoned e-mail messages about mending their troubled marriage.

On the witness stand, she was articulate and collected--an image that may have caused some jurors to doubt she could have been the seething killer portrayed by prosecutors. On the other hand, her poise as a witness would have done little to support a defense argument that she was legally insane on Nov. 22, 1999, when she shot three of her four sons.

Two court-appointed mental health experts--a psychiatrist and a psychologist--examined Caro, according to Deputy Dist. Atty. James Ellison. Neither found sufficient evidence to conclude she was insane at the time of the crimes, he said.

Under California law, defendants are legally insane only under narrowly defined circumstances that have nothing to do with a crime’s brutality. Instead, the standard for insanity hinges on whether some mental defect kept a defendant from knowing the difference between right and wrong.

When jurors return to court this morning, Coleman will discuss with them a schedule for the trial’s penalty phase, in which they will recommend Caro’s sentence to the judge.

The penalty hearing may not start until Nov. 27 because of travel plans made by a juror months ago, Coleman told attorneys Tuesday.