Michael Wims

Michael Wims is presented as a Utah Assistant Attorney General involved in the prosecution of Ron Lafferty. His role in the book’s account centers on the question of whether Lafferty’s religious extremism made him mentally incompetent or whether he remained responsible for his actions.

Role in the Competency Dispute

During the prosecution’s effort to portray Lafferty as fanatical but sane, Wims asked psychiatrist Noel Gardner to compare him with people Gardner had examined who had schizophrenia. Gardner testified that Lafferty differed from the severely ill patients he described: Lafferty engaged with other people, laughed with them, and could grasp the shared social meaning of humor and irony. The exchange placed evidence about Lafferty’s ordinary social capacities alongside his extraordinary religious claims, supporting the prosecution’s argument that zealotry alone did not establish psychosis.

Assessment After the Retrial

At Lafferty’s 1996 retrial, a twelve-person jury accepted the state’s position that he was not psychotic and had understood what he was doing when he participated in the murders of Brenda Lafferty and Erica Lafferty. Six years after that conviction, Wims summarized his view by describing Lafferty as crazy in a calculating sense. The remark reflected a broader suspicion, reported in the book, that Lafferty’s courtroom outbursts and religious pronouncements might have been performances intended to avoid a death sentence. It was Wims’s assessment, not a clinical finding established by the quotation itself.

Narrative Significance

Wims’s two appearances frame a central tension in the case: the difference between holding extreme religious beliefs and being legally incapable of understanding one’s actions. His questioning of Gardner brought that distinction into the courtroom; his later remark expressed skepticism that Lafferty’s behavior demonstrated genuine incapacity. The account thereby presents Wims as a voice for the prosecution’s view of responsibility, while leaving the broader difficulty of judging religious conviction and mental competence visible.