On the first day of his trial in the Key West courthouse just a block off rowdy Duval Street at America’s southernmost city, Daniel Weisberger arrived in a blue blazer, polo shirt, chinos and black-framed glasses. His short dreads had been buzzed to a close crop. His feet were shackled. At 21, Daniel no longer looked like the 17-year-old teenager in his mug shot, taken after he killed his little brother and nearly killed his father.
It took four years - including more than a year of treatment and drug therapy to stabilize Daniel’s mental health - to reach this day.
During those years, prosecutors and defense attorneys had constructed their cases from evidence collected by investigators, the Medical Examiner, a long roster of mental health professionals and thousands of pages of medical records.
For prosecutors, a picture of a violent, unruly troubled kid emerged. Increasingly resentful of his beloved little brother and feeling scorned by his mother, Daniel had also grown angry at his father. A string of arrests and placements in detention and treatment centers propelled him along a downward spiral. In their version, Daniel was plagued by a conduct disorder but not a more serious psychosis that defense attorneys say left Daniel unable to determine right from wrong or know what he was doing. For defense attorneys, those same records showed a pattern of missed diagnoses that also included flares through the years hinting at an unsettling, flowering psychosis.
In this episode, we head to trial where Judge Mark Jones will be left to decide between the two versions. Both sides agreed to a bench trial, meaning Jones will act as both judge and jury.