Medical Evidence not enough to Help Former Marine’s Bail Attempt
[social_share/]A raft of evidence supporting the view that ex-Marine Matthew Buendia was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder was insufficient to ensure he got bail at a court hearing on Tuesday.
Buendia has been charged with shooting at a Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Officer after she appeared at his apartment in September 2011. The trial is due in March this year and Buendia has been held in solitary confinement and denied bail since his arrest. This is the first time that his defense attorney has attempted to get Buendia released on bail.
Buendia is alleged to have pulled a gun out of his waistband and let off 9 shots at the deputy when she arrived to investigate a report that he was beating his girlfriend. Apparently, Buendia first asked whether Deputy Lyonelle De Veaux had come to help him find his missing dog, according to the Deputy’s own testimony. It was just after that question that he was alleged to have pulled his gun out and started shooting.
Mark O’Brien, Buendia’s attorney, brought evidence from an experienced psychologist who had spent a career dealing with returned servicemen who had suffered from a variety of psychological disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Buendia had spent time in the Middle East in the Marines and O’Brien said that his PTSD had made him a “wounded individual”. According to the Tampa Bay Times report of the hearing, O’Brien said that the shooting took place when Buendia was in a “dissociative state” and did not know what he was doing.
The attorney said that Buendia had not intended to kill a police officer. The psychologist, Ernest Boswell, had spent 15 hours evaluating Buendia and said that he had a severe form of PTSD and was not getting appropriate medication from doctors at the U.S. Veterans Affairs Department.
Boswell said that he had already documented two earlier periods in which Buendia had suffered from a dissociative state. He said that in his opinion Buendia had not known what he was doing the night that Deputy De Veaux showed up at his apartment. Boswell went on to say that he did not believe that Buendia had deliberately set out to commit a crime.
It was also claimed that doctors at the VA were in the habit of prescribing a number of medications without effectively communicating about each other’s prescriptions. As a result, it was quite possible that the combination of psychotropic drugs and pain killers he was taking for the disorder was disorientating him.
Another witness for the defense, Daniel Buffington, a pharmacologist, also testified at the court hearing. He said that the VA’s habit of prescribing drugs could be haphazard and even “reckless”.
The prosecution took a different view altogether, perhaps not surprisingly. Deputy De Veaux was present at the hearing together with a number of other deputies from the County Sheriff’s Office. The prosecution said that Buendia had shown he knew exactly what he was doing that night and did not want to be arrested for beating his girlfriend. The State Attorney asked the judge to deny Buendia bail because he was too dangerous to let out.
The Circuit Judge at the hearing said that the defense account as well as the account of the prosecution were both valuable, but insisted that his decision would be due to what happened on September 30th at Buendia’s apartment between him and the deputy and not on the defendant’s military or medical history.
Judge Richard Ficcarotta said that Buendia had been charged with a dangerous crime and that was enough to ensure he was denied bail until his trial.
Defense attorney O’Brien said that he still hoped that the trial would yield a different result. He said that a judge and jury were different things and he thought that the jury at the upcoming trial would see that Buendia was no “Dontae Morris”, referring to the man who had been sentenced to jail in Tampa recently for killing two police officers back in 2010.