A Pennsylvania man convicted last week in the 2012 murders of a baby and her grandmother exhibits signs of severe mental illness, including bipolar disorder that might have impaired his judgment, a forensic psychologist has testified. Raghunandan Yandamuri has a high IQ of about 120, Gerald Cooke told the court on Oct. 14, after spending at least nine hours with Yandamuri and administering several tests and evaluations, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. “Bipolar disorder is not a disorder that goes away, but impairs his emotional control,” Cooke told the court.
Cooke was the last to testify on behalf of Yandamuri in his sentencing hearing. After attorneys present closing arguments, jurors will start deliberating whether to sentence Yandamuri to death or to life in prison, the paper reported.
Yandamuri was convicted Oct. 9 of first-degree murder in the stabbing death of Satayrathi Venna, 61, and the suffocation death of her 10-month-old granddaughter, Saanvi Venna. Prosecutors said Yandamuri, 28, a former information technology worker from India on a work visa, plotted to kidnap the child for ransom money to feed his gambling problem and killed the grandmother when she got in his way.
Before the jury entered the courtroom on Oct. 10, convicted killer Raghunandan Yandamuri told a judge that he wants to receive the death penalty rather than life without the possibility of parole for the killing. Yandamuri did all this while asking the judge to allow him to also represent himself during the penalty phase.
“I don’t want this hearing,” Yandamuri quietly told the judge, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. “I would rather take the death penalty.” After consulting with his court-appointed attorney at the judge’s urging, however, he agreed to be present for the hearing and allow it to move forward.
A series of people then testified including a doctor who said Yandamuri has a gambling addiction and obsessive compulsive disorder. A county jail social worker also testified about some of Yandamuri’s run-ins behind bars including a suicide attempt and a fight that each landed him in solitary confinement.
Yandamuri represented himself in the trial and maintained his innocence throughout, blaming the deaths on two men who he said forced him to help them. He is being represented by attorney Henry S. Hilles for the penalty phase.
After his conviction, Yandamuri told Common Pleas Court Judge Steven T. O’Neill he wanted the death penalty. But, after speaking with Hilles, he later agreed to abide by the decision of the jury.
Shortly after the jury returned its verdict Oct. 9, Yandamuri’s mother took the stand to plead for her son’s life. She spoke of how Yandamuri’s father, a police officer in his native India, died when he was 10. She also mentioned that he tried to kill himself by drinking gasoline before he was even a teenager an since then has remained medicated while under the treatment of psychiatrist, local news reports said.
Prosecutors argued Yandamuri hatched the 2012 plot to pay for a gambling habit. They said he was mired in gambling debts and told police he committed the crime after losing at least $15,000 at a casino near his office. He told investigators he panicked after the grandmother, who had opened her family’s apartment door to him, was killed in a struggle over a kitchen knife he had carried.
Yandamuri knew the baby’s parents from his King of Prussia apartment complex. Like him, they were young technology professionals from India. He had gone to a birthday party for the baby’s mother, had met the visiting grandmother and used family nicknames in a ransom note demanding $50,000, authorities said.
“They both are working, so I thought maybe they have some money,” Yandamuri told police in a videotaped statement played at a preliminary hearing. “My intention was not to kill anyone or not to harm anyone. I only tried to kidnap the baby.”