So, the Sixth Amendment gives everybody who is charged with a crime the right to a competent defense. But that doesn’t mean that everybody actually has a defense. Case in point, the Pennsylvania man who killed his own father in January of last year and posted a video of himself holding his dad’s severed head on YouTube. Justin Moan was convicted last week after taking the stand at a bench trial. That means there’s no jury, uh, and admitting everything under oath. The same judge who found him guilty sentenced him on the same day to life in prison with no parole. It was actually two life sentences barring some kind of Menendez style uh legal miracle. Kind of like what we were just talking about. Justin Moan will never breathe free air again. And through it all, attorney Steven Jones was at Mo’s side and he joins us uh live now in his first national TV interview since the verdict and sentencing. Thank you for being with us, Stephen. I mean, it certainly seemed like a very interesting situation for an attorney to be in based on everything that I read uh about the case. There were no cameras in the courtroom, but what was his reaction uh when the verdict came down?

Hi, Brian. Um his his reaction was pretty stoic as it has been kind of through the entire uh the entire case. So, I I don’t know that it was necessarily unexpected. Uh he certainly wanted to go a different way, but uh when the verdict came down, I think he was accepting of what his fate was.

So Justin’s, and we covered this on Friday, his his mother, sister, brother, they all had these victim impact statements. They wanted him to go away for life, his own family. Did that surprise him? I mean, or did that upset him?

No, not actually not at all. Uh I don’t think it was unexpected. I mean, he, you know, based on what it was that he did, what he admitted to doing, and his reasons for doing it, which were um, you know, found to not be justified, but ultimately I think he expected the response that he got from his family. And as he sat there and and he took the verdict and he listened to what it was that they had to say, um, he was offered the chance to express some sort of remorse and and he was not interested in that.

Does he have any kind of contact with him at all anymore?

No, he’s not permitted to.

He’s not permitted to. Okay. Um, we were surprised when he took the stand in his own defense. Um, you know, somewhat rare during a murder trial. What were your In a way, it kind of felt like he was going rogue. What What were your thoughts on that? I mean, is that something that you guys talked about? Did you advise him to do it?

Well, I I don’t know that he went rogue. Um Justin was afforded the defense that he wanted. Um sometimes the defense that you assert and in fact pretty much all the time when you assert a defense it’s the defense that you want and oftentimes you may not listen to the advice that you’re given but that’s the the defense that he gave uh was the one that he wanted. I was appointed to represent Justin. I advised Justin on the possible defenses that were available to him obviously as I would any uh client and the defense that he chose was exactly the one that he wanted and that’s what he went with. So when he got on the stand, I don’t think anybody who was familiar with the case heard anything that hadn’t already been said by him, whether it was to the detectives in the case, uh the numerous people that he wrote letters to, uh letters that he wrote to the court, or or things that he said out loud to the news media.

Why no insanity uh plea? Because it’s the judge brought it up several times. Is is that something that you discussed with him at all?

I absolutely would discuss every defense that was available and the defense that was asserted by Justin was the defense that that he chose. Brian, he um was uh given the opportunity, they assessed his uh his competency. He was found to be competent. When you’re found to be competent, uh there’s only so much that can be done to try to assert a defense that’s outside of what that person actually wants. And the defense that he wanted, and if you had listened any of what it was that he was trying to present was that he was effectuating a citizen’s arrest and that unfortunately he says unfortunately his father resisted that arrest and he believed uh at least the defense that he wanted to assert was that he could um use deadly force uh against that resistance and the judge listened to the facts and disagreed with that.

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