Man gets life in prison for fatal stabbing.

Byline: Bill Bishop The Register-Guard

In a court session formalizing a foregone conclusion, Truett John Watts, 18, was sentenced Monday to life in prison with a mandatory 25-year term for fatally stabbing a man last year in Florence.

The hearing, which lasted less than three minutes, capped a trial highlighted by testimony of the teenager's chronic methamphetamine abuse since age 14 and hinged on a jury's decision that drugs, rather than mental illness, caused the apparent psychotic state Watts was in when he killed Randy Shane Wilkins, 44, a drifter who had befriended Watts' family.

Dressed in green jail clothes and chained at the ankles and wrists, Watts declined to comment in court before Lane County Circuit Judge Lyle Velure pronounced the automatic sentence. Velure, who presided over the trial and frequently reminds defendants during sentencing of the personal and social devastation caused by meth, also did not comment on the case.

Defense lawyer John Kolego briefly noted Watts had no criminal record and no pattern of violence before he stabbed Wilkins once in the chest with a 10-inch knife.

But Watts did have a yearlong history of psychotic disturbance that is not taken into account under the state's mandatory sentencing law for murder, Kolego said.

"The one-size-fits-all method of determining sentences creates injustice," Kolego told the judge. While Wilkins was an undeserving victim of a horrible crime, the law does not allow judges any flexibility to consider defendants as individuals, Kolego said.

Watts never denied the killing. The case came down to a battle between experts over whether Watts was so mentally ill that he could not understand the illegality of what he was doing or whether his psychosis was caused by drug abuse, which does not qualify as a mental illness under the law.

Dr. George Suckow, retired longtime state hospital director, testified that Watts' psychotic symptoms were in sync with patients who suffer paranoid schizophrenia. He said Watts lacked the hyperactive behavior of methamphetamine use.

Suckow said Watts was legally insane, making him eligible for treatment in a state hospital instead of prison.

Psychologist Eric Johnson, testifying for the prosecution, focused on a particularly powerful dose of methamphetamine that Watts told him was the beginning of a rapid mental decline in the month leading up to the killing. He said the dose showed Watts was primarily affected by meth.

Under the law, if a jury finds that drug use played a role in a defendant's psychosis, then the defense of legal insanity does not apply even if there is evidence of another underlying mental illness.

Jury deliberations are not public, but the conviction for murder was unanimous among the eight women and four men.

Under Oregon's Measure 11, the minimum 25-year term cannot be reduced for any reason.