Following Guilty Verdict, Cora Vides Trial Enters Sanity Phase

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This article was underwritten in part by the Mickey Flacks Journalism Fund for Social Justice, a proud, innovative supporter of local news. To make a contribution go to sbcan.org/journalism_fund.

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The same Santa Barbara jury that found Cora Vides guilty of attempted murder in the Valentine’s Day stabbing of her Laguna Blanca classmate, Georgia Avery, began to hear arguments regarding Vides’s sanity at the time on August 15. In this phase of the trial, the jury will ultimately decide where Vides will serve her sentence — a state prison or a state psychiatric hospital.

The jury must assume that Vides was sane at the time of the stabbing, and the burden lies on the defense to prove otherwise. To meet the requirements for legal insanity, Vides must have had a mental disease or defect at the time, and this defect must have caused her to not understand the quality and nature of her actions or to not know right from wrong.

“While in her right mind, Ms. Vides never wanted to hurt Ms. Avery,” said defense counsel Todd Maybrown. But Vides’s mental “decompensation” in the weeks leading up to the attack caused her to act on “intrusive thoughts, bad thoughts she couldn’t get out of her mind,” he argued.

Dr. Brandon Yakush, a court-appointed forensic psychologist, testified that Vides was legally insane the night of the stabbing due to a mix of her major depressive disorder and dissociative disorder — both “qualifying disorders” for legal insanity. He added that she had feelings of depersonalization and derealization during the attack, commonly known as having an out-of-body experience.

A new birth control medication that Vides began taking in December 2020 “was a major factor in how her depression got worse during that time,” Dr. Yakush said, but there is no literature to support the instance of birth control-induced dissociation, he added.

While he “didn’t think it got to psychosis,” Dr. Yakush said there was “overwhelming” evidence that Vides was in a dissociative state when she stabbed Avery. Vides’s blank stare during the attack and then “snapping out of it” is consistent with dissociation — it “can be there, and then not be there.”

Further, Dr. Yakush asserted that Vides did not know right from wrong at the time and was in a sort of “dream state” instead. “She knew the harm she was causing the victim, but didn’t know she was causing it,” he testified.

In a seven-hour-long evaluation that spanned over two days, Dr. Yakush found that Vides was coherent, goal-oriented, and had well-organized thoughts with no indications of delusions, hallucinations, or paranoia. However, her intermittent, intrusive ideations eventually “encompassed Avery,” causing the attack. 

In the 30-40 sanity evaluations Dr. Yakush has completed, he found 71 percent to be sane, and 29 percent to be insane — with only a small handful being women. The People brought up this point with questions about implicit biases. “I accounted for it the best I think I could have,” Dr. Yakush responded.

He also admitted that “lots of doctors use different definitions of insanity” in drawing their conclusions, and that “there are still parts of this case that are perplexing.”

Dr. Luigi Piciucco, a clinical and forensic psychologist retained by Vides’s previous counsel, testified via video conference and agreed with Dr. Yakush’s conclusion of legal insanity. Both found no evidence of malingering, or lying about one’s symptoms to avoid a specific outcome.

If the jury finds Vides was sane, she will be sentenced to 11 years to life in prison, meaning she will only be eligible for parole after serving 11 years behind bars. If she is found insane, she will be sent to a psychiatric hospital, where doctors will decide how long she is committed. Her length of stay could range from six months ― the minimum assessment period ― to much longer, depending on the outcome of her treatment.

The sanity phase of the trial will proceed through Monday, August 19.