The fiery cross-examination of a psychiatrist on Thursday brought her to the brink of tears as lawyers continued to battle over whether a nanny was insane when she killed two Upper West Side children under her care.
Dr. Karen Rosenbaum, an expert witness for the defense team, spent hours under direct and cross questioning on in Manhattan Supreme Court in order to defend her conclusion that the nanny, Ms. Yoselyn Ortega, “did not know or appreciate the consequences or nature of her actions” when she stabbed four-year-old Lucia and two-year-old Leo in October 2012.
The prosecution attempted to break down her testimony, focusing on their argument that the killings were premeditated because Ortega had left her family members important heirlooms and paperwork before heading out to work that fateful day.
Lead prosecutor Stuart Silberg also asked Rosenbaum to explain the stab wounds: “Every blow, every stab wound, is to the children. Doesn’t that tell you… that she knows that what she’s doing is going to cause death?”
Rosenbaum explained her medical opinion: “She wasn’t thinking for herself; she’s in a psychotic state of mind.”
“Why does she have hesitation marks but the children don’t?” Silberg retorted, voice dripping with sarcasm. “She just happened to be killing herself?”
Silberg also questioned Rosenbaum on why Ortega only mentioned hearing the devil’s voice after she had killed the children: “All the information about the devil ordering her to kill herself and her family… all come from the defendant after the murders, correct?”
“Yes,” she responded.
Throughout the cross-examination, Rosenbaum looked visibly distressed, turning to the judge for support and appearing to wipe her eyes. The defense attempted several times to object to the argumentative nature of Silberg’s questioning, but based on the nods from the members of the jury, his efforts had been successful.
Rosenbaum had been hired by the defense after the horrifying and bloody tragedy in order to assist in the claim that Ortega was not guilty due to mental disease or defect—a very difficult verdict to achieve, especially in New York State, where the standard for an insanity defense is extremely high. And this plea in effect gives the defense, not the prosecution, the burden of proof.
After speaking to Ortega 13 times, conducting 21 interviews of family members, friends, and neighbors, and reading over 8,000 pages of medical reports, Rosenbaum submitted a report in 2014. She diagnosed Ortega with major depressive disorder with psychotic features.
“There was no reason why she would want to hurt anybody,” Rosenbaum testified during direct examination, “other than the psychotic delusions she had been experiencing.”
She argued that Ortega had two symptoms coincide on the day of the killings, forcing her to kill the children and attempt to kill herself against her will. The first: command auditory hallucinations, or the voices of the devil and other black shadows that purportedly ordered the defendant to commit the grisly crime. The second: dissociation, which is a separation of the mind and the body that causes a person to be unaware of their actions.
“The hallucinations were really strong, the dissociation occurred, and then,” Rosenbaum paused, finishing the sentence in a near-whisper, “the stabbings.”
Rosenbaum’s cross-examination was scheduled to continue next week when the defense was expected to call several more expert witnesses to explain Ortega’s alleged mental illness.
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