I am very accustomed to people with dementia or mental illness or brain damage, laughing or smiling inappropriately. Also staring at me very fixedly - common with many symptoms including paranoia. People with paranoia tend to stare, no one knows why. I think they are basically being hyper-vigilant, due to being scared that some sort of threat is going to pop up out of nowhere at any time. Generally paranoia is not as disabling as the more disorganized behavior, like constantly laughing and smiling.
That doesn't bother me. After years of that one gets sort of a feeling for what is worth getting alarmed over and what is not.
When I look at that picture of him, I see a person who appears to be extremely tense and on edge - not at all creepy. Just someone who got caught. You have to not put too much weight on how people act in court. Most of them are working very hard to make a certain impression - and some people are hoping to be considered mentally ill. They generally have very idiotic ideas about what mental illness looks like and they may excite the public or journalists, but the doctors basically just very privately laugh at them.
In that photo, he looks like something is the matter with him, but I can't put my finger on what. I'd have to read his history to get an idea what it might be.
Most likely, his lawyer just said to him, 'no, there's not anything I can do about this, just shut up and don't get yourself any additional charges'.
We may think of violent people who commit horrible crimes as 'crazy', simply because they did something horrible.
But a good many violent criminals cannot be diagnosed with any specific mental illness - they may come from a difficult situation, they may have been abused, or have a history of drug or alcohol use, but there is no specific mental illness diagnosis that fits, in a lot of cases. Not all, but many.
They clearly don't have normal judgement, or make decisions in the same way normal people do, or have the same priorities. But they know what is happening, they know they are breaking a law, they know they are killing a real person - there is no psychotic thinking going on.
To me, though, when a non-psychotic person commits a violent crime, they realize what they're doing is wrong. But they still do it.
