In the week before Mickey Stines shot Judge Kevin Mullins nine times inside a Kentucky courthouse, everyone around him knew something was terribly wrong.

He'd lost forty pounds in two weeks. He wasn't sleeping. He was making phone calls to dead relatives. He told staff that shadowy forces were going to kill his wife and daughter. He made someone put a bulletproof vest on his wife. A local attorney warned the judge directly that Stines was "losing it." The police chief said he'd lost his mind.

Three days before the shooting, Stines sat for a deposition in a federal lawsuit tied to allegations of sexual exploitation inside the judge's chambers. According to everyone in the room, he was a mess — taking ten breaks, unable to answer basic questions, at one point saying "I'm having an episode."

Friends brought him to a doctor the day before. The diagnosis was acute stress. He was sent home. Twenty-four hours later, Kevin Mullins was dead.

Today we examine this case through a psychological lens. Not to excuse what happened — nine bullets, seven fired while the judge was already on the ground — but to understand what was happening inside Mickey Stines' head. The defense claims he was in psychosis, that he believed his family was in imminent danger, that he lacked the capacity to intend what he did. The court will decide if that's valid. But the harder question might be this: when everyone can see someone falling apart, whose job is it to stop them?

#MickeyStines #KevinMullins #LetcherCounty #KentuckySheriff #CourthouseShooting #TrueCrime #InsanityDefense #MentalHealthCrisis #HiddenKillers #TrueCrimeNews

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This publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.