The smoking-cessation drug Chantix has now played a crucial role in a second violent crime. On Monday, a Maryland man was found not criminally responsible for shooting his wife in the neck in their home in 2014 because he was found to be suffering from “involuntary intoxication” due to Chantix. His wife survived.
Last year, an Army soldier, who brutally stabbed another soldier to death in 2008, won a new hearing because the judge in his original trial refused to let him put on an involuntary intoxication defense. The soldier claimed that he was so neurologically disturbed by Chantix that he was not aware of what he was doing. A military court then reduced his sentence from life without parole to 45 years.
Involuntary intoxication is not a new defense, but as we discussed on the True Crime blog in May, it is having more success in courts across the country. Last year in St. Paul, Minn., a woman charged with trying to kill and assault her two small children was released when prosecutors decided that the charges could not stand “in light of the defendant’s involuntary intoxication at the time of the charged incident.” A Columbia, Mo., woman who was convicted of causing a fatal wreck while driving the wrong way on Interstate 70 has been granted a new trial because she may have been secretly given a “date rape” drug before taking the wheel.
Read more