State v. Pickens

LAWRENCE E. MOONEY, Judge.

Courts are no strangers to tragedy. But, in this case, we must recount crimes that are almost beyond our imagining. After hearing evidence from forty-eight witnesses over four days, a jury convicted the defendant, Judy Pickens, of killing her young son and poisoning her young daughter by giving them the drug Clonidine. 1 Yet the defendant complains on appeal only about the testimony of a single witness. At trial, the State called Dr. Michael Armour, a forensic psychologist, who testified about “factitious disorder by proxy,” a mental disorder also known as…