November 27, 2006
Benjamin Garris said he has no more appeals left; he has spent more than a decade serving a life sentence plus 50 years for the 1995 murder of Sharon Edwards at a psychiatric treatment center in Baltimore County.
“The only thing I could ever really hope for is to have my sentence modified,” he said recently in the visiting room of the Jessup Correctional Institution.
Garris plans to file in 2007 to have his sentence reduced.
He says he has had no infractions in prison, that he represents his cell block as a liaison to prison staff.
“It’s a waiting game,” he said. “People want to see what your pattern of behavior is.”
Whether the outside world believes Garris can one day walk free is still undecided.
“I take wholehearted responsibility for what was done,” he said. “I don’t expect anything miraculous … but I would like a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel.
“I don’t know how long will be long enough for the rest of the world.”
Garris has appealed his sentence before. The Maryland Court of Special Appeals affirmed his conviction in September 1996. On Oct. 14, 1998, he petitioned for post-conviction relief to have a new trial. The petition’s arguments centered on his use of Prozac.
Benjamin Garris had decided to die.
Everything was so different since he had run away with his friends to New York City and Boston in November 1994, when he left a note for his father simply stating “Dad — I’m sorry, but I have to go. Love, Ben.”
After years of teenage rebellion — sex, drugs, acting out in class, vandalism, shoplifting — following his parents’ divorce when he was 10, Garris was diagnosed with depression in the spring of 1994 at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda. Between his running away and January 1995, he went to a group home in Sykesville.
Back in Frederick, Garris saw a counselor and was put on 30 milligrams of Prozac a day for his depression.
But he felt himself slipping away, both academically and personally. He failed to keep a B average, and his girlfriend broke up with him.
Methodically, Garris planned his suicide. He started hoarding pills and researching through a computer encyclopedia what medicines could be lethal.
On the night of March 8, 1995, Garris consumed a bottle of cough syrup with codeine, Ambien, Sominex, NyQuil and whiskey.
If the family dog hadn’t found him and barked, the 15-year-old might have slipped away.
II
On March 10, 1995, at 3:42 p.m., two days after Garris’ suicide attempt, Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Health System took in medical record No. 89532-6 and admission No. 78018, diagnosed with “major depression, severe, recurrent (with suicide attempt).”
Medical records from March to September 1995 show fluctuations in mood and progress. Doctors and nurses charted a cycle: Garris appears to improve and then promptly reverts back to anger, silen
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ce and depression.
In the records, Garris’ parents often talk about how frustrating the treatment was, how he never seemed to improve.
Following months of Garris showing little or no emotion — putting a safety pin through his eyebrow and clothes pins on his nipples, cutting his arm and reporting a 13-pill overdose of the anti-convulsion and manic depression medication Depakote — doctors at the hospital began to recognize that he needed long-term residential treatment.
“He continues to verbalize suicidal and homicidal thoughts when angry,” Dr. Meenakshi Vimalananda wrote July 18. “He continues to invest his primary energies into dysfunctional relationships with peers, particularly females. He continues to engage in splitting staff as he does his family.”
Garris’ insurance provider granted him an additional 90 days at Sheppard-Pratt in August 1995 until he could be placed in a long-term center.
But there something else was wrong, too — something Garris and his parents attribute to his medication, specifically Prozac.
When he entered the hospital, Garris had been taking 30 milligrams of the antidepressant every morning; the dosage was increased incrementally to 60 milligrams in his first three weeks at Sheppard-Pratt, lowered temporarily to 40 milligrams on June 2, and then raised back to 60 milligrams two weeks later.
This was eventually combined daily with 1,000 milligrams of Depakote.
“He was just blank,” Garris’ father, Steve Garris, said. “Within three months (of treatment), he was a completely changed person.”
Garris became very placid and cooperative, said John Lee, his stepfather, but would flare up in anger and hurt himself.
“It was like a ‘Stepford child,’” Mr. Lee said. “We had no idea what was really going through his head.”
Also troubling was the violence in Garris’ mind — bloody images that came in flashes, like lightning storms in his head.
He wondered aloud to his mother, Tina Lee, what another patient would look like without hands or feet, trussed up like a pig with an apple in his mouth. He describe to his father a vision of the Lees chained down to a burning bed. He asked hospital staff about bomb ingredients.
Garris’ parents asked if the hospital staff could search his room, in case he was planning to run away again; they were told no, that would invade his privacy.
“I didn’t think violent thoughts (before). That’s not a part of who I am,” Garris said. “It was like I was in the back seat and someone else was driving.”
He said his mind cleared in prison, once he stopped taking medication.
III
Garris’ petition for post-conviction relief, sent to Baltimore County Circuit Court in October 1998, relied heavily on a report about his medical treatment written by Dr. Peter Breggin.
Dr. Breggin, a psychiatrist, is highly critical of Prozac. In his 1994 book, “Talking Back to Prozac,” he describes how his independent research into the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval of Prozac revealed a high dropout rate that resulted in only 286 patients making it all the way through the 17 studies before the drug’s approval. Even then the data still did not show any effectiveness greater than antidepressants already on the market, Dr. Breggin wrote.
The basis for the new trial request was that Garris had insufficient counsel. The arguments of his lawyer, Howard Cardin, rested on lack of premeditation rather than being not criminally responsible — i.e., whether Garris was under the influence of drugs and therefore could not be held responsible for the murder.
Dr. Breggin argued that 60 milligrams a day of Prozac, three times the recommended adult dose at a time when the drug was not approved for children and adolescents, increased Garris’ potential for violent action.
During FDA trials, Dr. Breggin wrote in his report, slightly more than 1 percent of Prozac users experienced medication-induced psychosis, and documented reports in scientific literature, such as The Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychology, show how at-risk patients comparable to Garris are more in danger of succumbing to adverse affects.
“Ben was psychotic at the time of the offenses and Prozac, without question, can cause or exacerbate psychosis,” Dr. Breggin’s report states.
The court, however, did not believe Garris’ petition necessitated a new trial.
In a May 1999 opinion, Judge Dana M. Levitz wrote that Mr. Cardin’s argument of a lack of premeditation was a strategic decision that did not meet the criteria for insufficient counsel.
“Mr. Cardin was faced with the difficult task of representing a defendant in a brutal crime for which the State had overwhelming evidence of the Defendant’s guilt. Less experienced attorneys would have been at a loss to present any viable defense,” Judge Levitz wrote. “After reviewing the transcript, this Court is impressed with the professionalism and tenacity of the defense in this case. The defendant was entitled to competent legal representation; he was not entitled to a magician.”
IV
In “A Clockwork Orange,” the 1971 Stanley Kubrick adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ book, society is plagued by nihilistic teenagers who terrorize innocent people with beatings and rapes. A young man is arrested and trained like Pavlov’s dog to associate violence with physical sickness. That rehabilitation eventually fails.
In “Natural Born Killers,” a 1994 release conceived by Quentin Tarantino and directed by Oliver Stone, two lovers travel across the country on a murder spree, both feared and admired by the media before they incite a prison riot and escape.
Both films played a role in the public image of Garris when he escaped from Fordham Cottage at Sheppard-Pratt and eluded capture for about three weeks.
A day after Garris was charged with Sharon Edwards’ murder, an Oct. 10, 1995, article in a Frederick newspaper quoted Baltimore County Police Detective Sam Bowerman.
“Lt. Bowerman said friends of the youth have described him as manipulative, intelligent, well-read on violent crime and a chronic liar,” the article states.
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“He has been a fan of ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and may have recently been acting out scenes from movies or books, the officer said. ‘A Clockwork Orange’ is both a novel and film about violent youth.”
On Oct. 11, 1995, a Frederick newspaper published an interview with Sarah Scully, his ex-girlfriend.
Ms. Scully showed a reporter a photo of Garris “standing pensively by a tree, his head shaved, wearing sunglasses and looking like Woody Harrelson in the movie ‘Natural Born Killers,’” the article states.
According to the article, Ms. Scully said she watched the movie eight times with Garris.
The article continues: “Some time ago, said Miss Scully, Garris told her he planned to steal a Ford Bronco, steal guns and ‘we were just going to run’ like Mickey and Mallory in ‘Natural Born Killers,’ a movie about a couple’s crime spree.”
The same article mentions “A Clockwork Orange.”
“Garris also believes he is ‘Alex’ from ‘A Clockwork Orange’, a book and movie about a violent man a futuristic government attempts to rehabilitate, (Miss Scully) said.”
Defining the movies as obsessions is wrong, Garris said recently in Jessup. He never craved bloodshed or believed he was either of those characters — he simply wanted to run away from institutions that had imprisoned him.
“The whole thing was blown up out of proportion,” he said.
Public perception crystallized into rumors that Garris would come back to Frederick High School on Friday, Oct. 13, 1995, and explode a bomb. Plainclothes deputies began roaming the halls, and one math teacher locked the door to her classroom.
Those movies, Garris said, had nothing to do with his problems, which were manifested in his efforts to be a class clown and acting out like a rebellious teenager.
“I was an actor without a stage,” he said. “I always wanted to be in the spotlight.”
“A Clockwork Orange” was so dense, especially with its use of fictitious Russian slang, that Garris never even finished the film or book.
“I just saw something that was very cult and kitsch,” he said. “We couldn’t even watch the whole damn thing.”
Garris’ confession after the crime fueled the notion that he was consumed by violent fantasy by quoting “A Clockwork Orange.”
“Oh yes, brothers, it grew into a real horrorshow, with devotchkas kreeching their eyes out over unforgivable sinny winnys sins that your humble narrator was soon enough the catalyst of,” the confession states.
Garris said the confession shows how delusional he was at the time, and how separated he felt from his actions.
“Why I did it, I have no É clue,” he said recently. “I couldn’t understand that I wrote that.”
Public fascination with these two films, and the violence sometimes attributed to them, stems from their voyeuristic qualities according to Robert Thompson, founding director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University and a trustee professor of Television and Popular Culture at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.
Mr. Thompson said the “you are what you watch” thesis whitewashes the complexity of human motivations, particularly with violence.
“To make that direct cause and effect (between actions and movies) … is a very dangerous thing to do,” he said. “There’s a big middle step that a lot of people ignore, and the problem is a lot of people include the general public.”
Offering a pop culture comparison is easy, Mr. Thompson said, but it distorts reality.
“That’s a common cultural thing people can understand,” he said. “That really brings a whole bunch of baggage to the story because you already have a narrative.”
During Garris’ trial, “A Clockwork Orange” was introduced into evidence. A jury’s objectivity is endangered when a defendant is crafted as an imitation of a pop culture figure, Mr. Thompson said.
“You’re not really trying Ben Garris. You’re trying Alex (from A Clockwork Orange).”
V
People who know Ben Garris best don’t recognize the image projected in the courts, newspapers and television shows. They remember a teenager everyone had called “Gentle Ben” since childhood.
“He was a normal kid. He had his ups and downs, just like any other kid,” John Lee said. “He was not this monster.
“(But) it’s easier for society to come up with a picture of what they think (a criminal) should be. It scares people to think ‘it could be my kid.’”
More than 10 years after the murder, Steve Garris doesn’t believe his son’s hometown understands who he is — a kid who, when he was 7, opened a bag holding his stuffed animals because he was afraid they wouldn’t have enough air.
“I wish they could know him for who he really was and not who he was made out to be,” Mr. Garris said.
For Tina Lee, Garris will always be her son, the one who chose Augustine as his confirmation name in the Catholic Church without knowing that her own confirmation name, Monica, was St. Augustine’s mother.
Garris’ room hasn’t been changed, she said, and it still bears a mural he painted before he went to Sheppard-Pratt, one that depicts his tortured emotions.
“When he gets out, we’ll paint over it together,” she said.
For now, Garris finds solace in painting in his cell.
Conversations about anything — the crime, Frederick, literature — inevitably lead back to the apologies he writes in brushstrokes.
“I wish I could say 10 years in prison helps you deal with it,” he said. “It doesn’t soften anything. It doesn’t soften the edges at all. And those memories are still here. I’m probably never going to let those things go.
“And I don’t want to.”
Garris doesn’t expect people to relate to his life. He doesn’t expect them to feel sorry for him. He said he only wants them to know he is trying to apologize.
“I don’t have sympathy (for other prisoners) É which makes me question who the hell will have sympathy for me.”
VI
If, one day, Garris leaves the Jessup Correctional Institution, his first stop won’t be his mother’s home in Frederick or his father’s in Lusby, Va.
If he ever gets into a car, it will take a right out of House of Corrections Road onto Md. 175.
The car will pass porch-lined houses, Jessup Elementary School, churches and a community center, and merge onto I-295 north toward Baltimore.
From there it will take exit 3A, and turn right on Md. 2 North. One last right turn will take the car onto Cedar Hill Lane, a small road edged by tall trees and modest houses that turns into a rutted, unpaved path leading through the two small brick pillars that mark the entrance to Mount Calvary Cemetery, where Sharon Edwards is buried.
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