This is Hidden Killers with Tony Brucey.

When you hear that a sheriff walks into a courthouse and executes a sitting judge,

your mind automatically goes to cold-blooded murder, right?

Well, the thing with this is that the sheriff is the one who kills the judge.

Well, he was deposed in a lawsuit implicating that very judge in a courthouse sex for leniency scandal.

What if I told you that when he turned himself in, his first words were about his wife and daughter being in danger. Now, the defense is

pushing a mental health angle, claiming he was suffering from an extreme emotional disturbance

and now have even

upped it to insanity. So was this a calculated act of revenge or was this a man in complete

psychological collapse? Javon Scott, psychotherapist and author joining us from a clinical standpoint,

what does it take for someone to reach a psychological breaking point like this and

commit such an extreme act? And do these extreme emotional responses happen instantly? Or is

something that, you know, maybe built up over time a bit in a case like this? Boy, this is a guy

I would love to sit down and talk to and get a sense for him.

It's so hard to know.

Extreme emotional disturbance, which is what they're claiming here, isn't a clinical diagnosis.

You don't find it in our diagnostic manual.

So it's a legal term that you find in just a handful of states. Not all states even use it. Apparently they do there.

So what does it mean? Usually it's alluding to the kind of event, the thing that's always referenced is walking in on your wife in bed with another man and picking up a gun and shooting him because

you're just so upset. So it implies that you're not mentally ill, you're just a regular person,

but you're so distraught by something that any of us can relate to that you lose control

in that situation. So it implies that it's not premeditated. But when they throw in insanity,

...