Diminished Capacity

“I couldn’t help myself.”

Hot blood. Uncontrollable impulse. Temporary insanity. Different names for the same idea: Sometimes, you just lose it.

Who can honestly say they’ve never done something they later regretted? Certainly not Dave Brunelle, homicide prosecutor and all too fallible human being. But not all bad decisions are made equal. When Brunelle finds himself standing over the remains of a murdered homeless man, his head stomped into a train rail, he vows to hold the killer responsible.

But the killer claims mental illness, arguing the legal doctrine of “diminished capacity” to assert he had no legal intent to kill the victim. And Brunelle’s own mental capacity will be tested by an old flame and the ghosts of his own bad decisions.
Can Brunelle keep his head together long enough to convince the jury that sometimes, no matter why the killer did it, murder is still murder?