CHELSEA — Despite a long history of documented mental illness and nearly three dozen hospitalizations, a 30-year-old Randolph woman charged last year in the stabbing death of her boyfriend has been deemed mentally competent to stand trial.
Victoria Griffin participated remotely on Wednesday morning in an Orange Superior Court competency hearing via teleconference from the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington where she is incarcerated.
At the hearing, both Orange County State’s Attorney Dickson Corbett and Griffin’s defense attorney Michael Shane stipulated that Griffin at this time is competent to stand trial at this time and agreed to the admission of a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation, both of which Superior Court Judge Thomas Zonay granted.
The judge at the same time granted a request by the defense to bring in their own experts to assess Griffin’s competency and set a status conference to be held within 90 days.
“We have had a tough time in getting out-of-state experts in the facility,” Shane told the judge during the teleconference, which lasted only a few minutes. “Over the coming week we should be able to get people in there.”
Griffin has pleaded not guilty to a second-degree murder charge after police said she stabbed her 44-year old boyfriend, Concepcion Cruz, multiple times in the torso during an argument last December at the apartment they shared in Randolph.
In the police affidavit, Griffin told police that the argument with Cruz began when she left to go to the store without him and as it escalated she threatened to stab Cruz if he didn’t leave.
At one point Griffin said Cruz pushed her against the wall and she hit him.
Griffin said she remembers seeing a knife block on the counter but then “blacked out” and when she came to she was lying on the kitchen floor and holding two steak knife handles that were missing their blades, the affidavit reports Griffin telling police.
Attempts by Cruz’s teenage sons, who were present in the apartment, to stanch the bleeding and save their father were not successful, according to the affidavit.
The 15-page evaluation of Griffin, conducted via video conference over four hours and 15 minutes in March by Dr. Jonathan Weker, a Montpelier forensic psychiatrist, detailed Griffin’s account of her long history of mental illness, at various times describing episodes of bipolar disorder, mania and depression.
The evaluation relates Griffin’s account of her personal history, including pregnancy as a young teenager, abusive relationships with boyfriends, prostitution and cannabis use disorder.
“The defendant stated she was diagnosed with bipolar 1 disorder with psychotic features the first time she was hospitalized … she estimated she has been hospitalized 30 times altogether, many of which occurred in 2015 and in 2018,” Weker wrote.
Griffin also told Weker that she had no memory of attacking Cruz.
“My thing is, I don’t remember anything from the time Coco (Cruz) started arguing until the time I was in the cop car,” the evaluation quotes Griffin saying. “I have no recollection of what I told” the police.
But despite the long recounting by Griffin of episodes of mental illness and repeated hospitalizations, Weker said he nonetheless determined the defendant has “rational as well as factual” understanding of the charges against her, is aware of how the legal process proceeds and is capable of consulting with her attorney — all factors in assessing whether or not the defendant is capable to stand trial.
Yet Weker appeared to allow that his determination of Griffin’s mental competency to stand trial also has an element of timing as to when he examined her.
“In the context of her considerable history of mental difficulties, as I have come to understand it, I would note that this examination occurred at a time when her condition appears to have been optimally treated,” Weker concluded. “Examination of her competency at times when her condition had been less salubrious could foreseeably have led to a different conclusion.”
Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.
