A Parallel Case?

A case similar to Pring-Wilson’s arose in 1995, when a Brown University psychiatrist-in-training shot an East Providence handyman in an early morning fight at a gas station.

The accused, David Barrett, argued that he acted in self-defense when the handyman intervened in an argument between Barrett and the clerk at the gas station’s convenience store.

The defense also argued that Barrett was legally insane at the time of the shooting because of a mental illness.

Jonathan H. Saltzman, a reporter who covered the Barrett trial for the Providence Journal-Bulletin and is currently covering the Pring-Wilson tiral for the Boston Globe, says a complex town-gown relationship also existed in the Providence area.

In a Providence Journal-Bulletin article dated Jan. 25, 1999, Saltzman wrote that the victim’s relatives feared Barrett would get “preferential treatment” from a jury due to the disparity in economic status and education between the victim and the defendant.

But Saltzman also wrote that Barrett’s lawyer believed that “just as people shouldn’t be penalized for lack of education and money, so shouldn’t people be pilloried for affluence.”

Last May a judge ruled against Pring-Wilson’s motion in which he cited mental and physical trauma as a reason to suppress statements he made the night of the stabbing.

However, Saltzman points to key differences between Barrett and Pring-Wilson’s mental conditions.

“The obvious difference is that in that case he [Barrett] was contending that the mental illness was the big factor,” Saltzman said. “The question was whether it had so impaired his judgment that he was legally insane.”

The judge in that case ruled that anger, not mental illness, was the root of the murder, and Barrett was sentenced to 30 years in prison, according to Saltzman’s article.