ALBANY — The lawyer for Lorenz Kraus, the man who admitted in a TV interview to killing his parents and burying them in the backyard of their Crestwood Court home eight years ago, is leaving the door open to a possible insanity defense in the case.
Kraus’s attorney, Assistant Public Defender Rebekah Sokol, filed a document known as a psychiatric defense notice last month. The notice is a form defense attorneys submit if they want to introduce psychiatric evidence or argue for their client’s diminished responsibility for an alleged crime because of “mental disease or defect.”
In most cases, the document must be filed within 30 days of a defendant’s arraignment. The document does not require a defense attorney to mount an insanity defense but preserves it as an option. Prosecutors have the right to order a defendant to submit to an examination by a psychiatrist or psychologist after the notice has been filed…