The high Council upholds the conviction of Thijs H. for three murders. According to the highest court, the court made no errors in sentencing him to 22 years and TBS.
Thijs Hermans, who is mentioned by his full name at his request, received this sentence for the premeditated murder of three random walkers. On May 4, 2019, he stabbed a woman to death in a park in The Hague who was walking her dogs, and three days later he stabbed two other walkers again on the Brunsummerheide.
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How Thijs Hermans slipped further into psychosis: a reconstruction
The court in Den Bosch that convicted Hermans determined that he suffered from a mental disorder during the murders, but that at the same time he worked systematically and consciously made rational choices. The court therefore deviated from expert advice, which ruled that Hermans should have been declared completely incompetent due to psychosis. The Supreme Court has now determined that judges may decide for themselves whether there is a disorder and also to what extent that disorder causes a suspect to be partially incompetent.
Psychosis
Hermans was in a psychosis and acted because he was instructed to do so within his psychotic reality, researchers from the Pieter Baan Center established during the trial. They concluded that Hermans was completely unreasonable. The apparently rational decisions that Hermans made during the crimes, such as choosing his victims and turning off his phone, should also be explained by that psychosis.
The Pieter Baan Center even pointed out a possible cause for the psychosis, namely the drug dexamphetamine. Hermans was prescribed this by the Mondriaan mental health institution. When prescribing that drug, Mondriaan did not take Hermans’ previous possibly psychotic episodes into account and diagnosed him with ADD. A misdiagnosis, according to the Pieter Baan Center, which determined that Hermans was already psychotic six months before the murders and had made a serious suicide attempt. Prescribing the psychosis-inducing drug dexamphetamine may therefore have resulted in the psychosis in which Hermans committed the murders.
Serious doubts
The conclusions and the advice to declare Hermans incompetent were confirmed by a second expert report from the Dutch Institute for Forensic Psychiatry. A third report, commissioned by the court, did not reach any conclusion or advice. In their own words, the new researchers were given “insufficient insight into Hermans’ perception of the world.” But in their report they did express serious doubts about the psychosis and even about the seriousness of a suicide attempt six months earlier.
Partly on the basis of that third report, the court previously did not reach a conclusion as to whether Hermans was psychotic. It did conclude that Hermans was partly accountable due to his apparently rational actions.
This reasoning led to a lot of criticism in the forensic psychiatric world, which accused the judges of taking the psychiatrist’s place.
In its judgment today, the Supreme Court introduced an ‘assessment framework for answering the question of whether an offense charged can be attributed to the suspect’. This assessment framework means that judges can determine for themselves, regardless of expert reports, whether a suspect suffers from a disorder that ensures that he can still see the criminality of his own actions.
The Supreme Court thus establishes that the court’s conviction for triple murder with premeditation is “not incomprehensibly motivated” and is therefore upheld. The Supreme Court did reduce the imposed sentence by two months, because the case has now been going on for more than four years.
The case is therefore irrevocable from a criminal law point of view. However, there is still a civil proceeding by Hermans against Mondriaan about the mistakes made during his treatment – an internal evaluation of this is being kept secret for the time being. There is also a disciplinary complaint against the rapporteurs of the third report.