At just before 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday, March 13, 2012, Robert Rubin stood before the jury and talked about what his client had done to the family of Rusty Sneiderman. “They lost their son, brother, father,” he said. “There’s emotion they are going through that hopefully none of you or us will have to deal with, and nothing we have said or done has been unmindful of the respect and empathy they deserve.”
If only Hemy Neuman knew better, he said, if only he had the capacity at the moment he pulled the trigger to realize what he was doing was wrong. “In fact,” said Rubin, “as bizarre as it sounds, he thought he was doing the right thing.” Acknowledging that at first blush all this “makes no sense,” Rubin opened his summation by reminding the jury what his experts had said repeatedly, that Georgia law does not hold a person criminally responsible if he doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong at the time of the offense.
“We have to prove insanity,” Rubin continued, the courtroom filled with family and friends of both sides, including Hemy’s mother who sat behind him in the audience section. Andrea was still barred from the courtroom, but Rusty’s brother and father were there. Rubin said the legal threshold for proving insanity was a preponderance of evidence—more-this-than-that. It was not, he said, the far more rigorous standard of beyond-a-reasonable-doubt faced by the prosecution to prove the murder charge. Rubin laid out the options that the judge would later enumerate: not guilty, not guilty by reason of insanity, guilty, and guilty but mentally ill. That last option held the power of a conviction, and he urged the jury to reject that as a “compromise.” “Guilty but mentally ill is guilty,” Rubin said.
Retracing the testimony of the defense’s mental health professionals, Rubin said, “Hemy Neuman did not have the capacity to distinguish between right and wrong.” Those witnesses came to that conclusion based on analysis of the documents and interviews with Hemy and others. Hemy’s childhood trauma, his undiagnosed bipolar disorder with delusions, and his mounting personal problems all set the stage for disaster. To fail to see this, Rubin said, was to fail as a mental health professional.
He then launched a broadside against the prosecution’s expert Dr. Crawford, tarring her as overpaid and underqualified and lumping her in with Andrea Sneiderman. “Two people got on that stand and lied to you in your face,” he said. “One got two million dollars, the other got sixty thousand.” Andrea Sneiderman and the life insurance policy and Dr. Crawford and her consulting fee—these were the twin villains in the case, Rubin argued.
“In June 2010, Hemy Neuman has dinner with Andrea Sneiderman,” said Rubin. “In June 2010, Hemy Neuman opens up to her like he never opened up before and tell her about his childhood. You saw on the clips. He tells her what he felt and how this affected him. Doug Peters will talk to you about his relationship and why his relationship with Andrea Sneiderman led to the death of Rusty Sneiderman.”
And this co-counsel Peters did, with a fury. He branded Andrea an “adulterer, tease, calculator, liar, and master manipulator.” Andrea, he said, intuited everything the mental health professionals would later diagnose. “Andrea knew Hemy was losing his mind,” Peters said. “Sophia and Ian’s daddy’s blood is on the hands of Andrea Sneiderman. She is the person, the one person, who knew that Hemy was spinning out of control. She knew Rusty had been shot because she had primed the pump, planted the seed, stoked the fire. She knew that she was with someone who was sick.” In the end, Peters said, “This case is about one bad—one really bad—woman: Andrea Sneiderman. The gun was in Hemy’s hand, but the trigger, I suggest, was pulled by Andrea Sneiderman.”
Peters sought to assure the jury that finding him not guilty by reason of insanity would still protect society. “Hemy will not go free. He will be held in the state mental institution,” said Peters. “He is paying the price for what he has done. We wouldn’t ask for anything else. A verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity is a verdict that speaks the truth. A verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity is a verdict that says Andrea Sneiderman is responsible for the death of her husband. A verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity is a verdict that says Hemy was used, Hemy was manipulated.”
* * *
District Attorney Robert James had the final word, having waived the state’s right to give arguments first. After a courtroom break, Hemy returned to his seat in apparent good spirits, smiling to his mother. But as James launched into what would be an impassioned summation, the DA insisted that this grinning face could not be trusted. “He’s not insane. He’s just evil,” said James. “He’s not crazy, but he’s a co-conspirator”—Andrea being the other party, although not charged. “Why did Hemy Neuman shoot and murder Rusty Sneiderman on November 18, 2010? Ladies and gentlemen, I submit not because of some made-up, some contrived, some constructed mental defect. It’s simple. Hemy Neuman killed Rusty Sneiderman because he wanted his wife, because he wanted his money, because he wanted his life. Period. That’s it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is not insanity. That is not mental illness. In Georgia, in courtrooms, we call that good old-fashioned cold-blooded malice murder.”
Taking the jury through the law as the defense had, James ticked off the various elements of each charged offense and argued that the state had proved them. The biggest was malice aforethought, the centerpiece of murder charges everywhere in the country. Hemy planned it like a work project, James said. “He intended to kill him and he in fact did kill him. That’s crystal-clear.”
The other legal element, he said, was Hemy’s affirmative defense of insanity, a defense that James mocked. “I can go back three decades to quote Flip Wilson: The devil made me do it. The angels made me do it,” he said. But under the law, James said, with an affirmative defense the prosecution need only prove that he committed the crime. Since the law gives a “presumption of sanity”—something the defense did not bring up, he noted—“We do not have the burden of proving he was not insane. We do not have to prove that he is sane. We don’t have that burden. We have to prove nothing.” It was up to the defense to prove insanity, and here they failed, he argued. Just because Hemy had a traumatic childhood or possibly suffered bipolar disorder didn’t mean he failed to know the difference between right and wrong when he gunned down Hemy. James wasn’t even willing to concede that Hemy was bipolar. Hemy’s friends and co-workers all testified they saw no change in his behavior around the time of the killing. “Same ol’ Hemy,” said James. “That’s all they said.”
What might better explain Hemy’s behavior was something else, James said. “He’s having an affair,” said James. “He’s about to go to the room and do the horizontal mambo. Yes, it’s great. What man wouldn’t be like: Woo, I’m about to have sex. It’s great. If that makes him insane, then half the men walking down the street are insane. Really? That’s evidence of mania?”
Hemy lied to his friends, his family, his co-workers, and then, when he got arrested, to the mental health professionals. When the truth got too dicey for him, he claimed to have a faulty memory, said the DA. “Erotomanic delusions?” he said. “He’s having an affair, full-fledged affair, holding hands and drinking wine. He’s saying, ‘I love you,’ and she’s reciprocating. What is he confused about?… If the relationship turns out exactly what he thought it was, he ain’t crazy. He’s correct.”
It was a relationship so close, he said, that Hemy confessed to Andrea in the phone call shortly after the shooting. “Hemy didn’t hide his crime from Andrea because Andrea already knew,” James said. “How could she know thirty minutes after [Rusty] was shot that he had been shot?” He pointed to Hemy. “The only person who could’ve told her is sitting right here.”
James wrapped up his argument by displaying two photos, one of Rusty alive and happy, the other of him bloodied and near death after the shooting. “This is a case about a real man. Look at him: flesh and blood. He did not deserve this. Rusty deserved a life,” he said. “On November 18, 2010, the defendant Hemy Neuman did this. This twisted little man, he did this to Rusty Sneiderman. This is what he did and they had the temerity and gall to call him a good man. Good men don’t sleep with other men’s wives. Good men don’t do what he did.”
* * *
The jury retired for deliberations at 3:50 p.m. and selected a forewoman. After less than an hour, in their first decision, they sent a note asking to go home. The next morning, after about two hours of deliberations, the jury asked to review the videotaped interview in jail between Hemy and the prosecution’s expert, Dr. Crawford. The panel was brought back into the jury room and watched and listened again as Hemy broke down in tears while recounting his childhood traumas and talking about Andrea. “I don’t know,” he said, “something about the connection with Andrea. Even with Reli, I was never emotional about it. It was just something that happened. With Andrea, there was this connection. She was listening to it. It was great. I opened up.”
The jury deliberated for the rest of the day and for nearly two hours the next morning, when a question came out asking for the written reports of the mental health experts who examined Hemy. Since the reports had not been entered into evidence—only the witnesses’ testimony—the judge turned down the request and told the jury to rely only on what they heard in court. The jurors took a lunch break and resumed talks.
At 1:45 p.m. on March 15, a message went to the judge. The jury had reached a verdict.