Ky. Supreme Court upholds split verdict against man who killed Versailles 6-year-old
The Kentucky Supreme Court has upheld the conviction of a man who stabbed a 6-year-old boy to death in the child’s Versailles home in 2015.
Attorneys for Ronald Exantus, 37, appealed his case, saying that the split verdict handed down by a jury in Fayette County was inconsistent. Exantus was found guilty but mentally ill of three counts of assault, but not guilty by reason of insanity on counts of murder and burglary. He was sentenced to 20 years.
Exantus’ attorneys argued that if he was not sane enough to be found guilty of murder and burglary, he shouldn’t have been found guilty on the counts of assault.
However, the Kentucky Supreme Court found that each count Exantus was indicted with could be considered individually and that the jury could have reasonably believed that Exantus was more lucid for some parts of the attack than he was for others. Justice Debra H. Lambert wrote the court’s opinion upholding the jury’s verdict, and all of the justices on the court concurred.
Exantus was a dialysis nurse in Indianapolis before the attack that killed Logan Tipton on Dec. 7, 2015. People close to Exantus said that in the days leading up to the attack Exantus had begun behaving strangely.
Exantus was sleeping less, eating less, and having episodes of crying and extremely unusual behavior, according to trial testimony. At some point, Exantus asked his girlfriend to marry him, seemingly out of the blue. On the night of the attack, he told that same woman he wouldn’t marry her and left their home.
Evidence indicated Exantus was driving to Florida, where he has family, but he ended up in the Versailles neighborhood where Logan was asleep in his home with his father and siblings.
Exantus later told police that he’d seen a sign for a Gray Street and it reminded him of the show “Grey’s Anatomy,” making him think he needed to perform surgery on someone there, the court wrote.
The house was unlocked because a key had been broken and Logan’s mother needed a way to get in after returning from a night shift. Exantus entered, went upstairs, where the children were sleeping, and fatally stabbed Logan, according to trial testimony. After one of the children went downstairs to get their father, a fight between Exantus and the children’s father ensued. The assault charges were connected to injuries to the father and Logan’s siblings during the attack.
Only one witness, clinical psychologist Dr. Kenneth Benedict, testified in Exantus’ trial as a mental health expert. During his testimony, Benedict said that it is possible that psychosis can “wax and wane” over the course of an hour, or even over the course of thirty minutes, according to the court’s opinion.
“This testimony, coupled with the fact that psychosis and mania do not necessarily equate to legal insanity, provided the jury with a basis to find that Exantus’ mental state could have shifted from insanity to guilty but mentally ill during the short period of time in question,” the court wrote in the opinion. “Or, in other words, the jury could have reasonably believed that Exantus was having intervals of lucidity during the commission of his crimes.”
Additionally, the court’s opinion speculates that the split verdict could have been a result of jurors being unable to agree on either the defense’s argument that Exantus wasn’t culpable for any of the counts, or the prosecution’s argument that he should be found guilty on all counts.
“The case now before us is nothing if not difficult,” the court wrote. “This Court strongly suspects that the verdicts in this case were reached because the jury could not reach either of the all-or-nothing verdicts advocated for by the parties. The defense urged the jury to find Exantus not guilty by reason of insanity on all counts, while the Commonwealth argued that the jury had to find him guilty on all counts. Neither party directly advocated for a verdict of guilty but mentally ill on any count. It is, therefore, possible that the jury reached its verdicts through compromise and the exercise of lenity.”
This story was originally published December 17, 2020 at 3:23 PM.
