Sunday Times Magazine Sets Up Peter Braunstein Defense

It’s fitting that “fire perv” Peter Braunstein’s legal team is using neurolaw — a trendy defense nowadays — to explain his raping and kidnapping a woman:

Peter Braunstein, 43, is about to go on trial, charged with a bizarre crime against a woman who worked in his own newsroom. Prosecutors say he dressed as a firefighter, staged a fire to get into her Chelsea apartment, tied her to a bed, drugged her with chloroform and sexually molested her for 13 hours.

As the trial opens today in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, jurors will be asked to decide whether he was a sadistic man preying on an unsuspecting woman or whether his actions were the result of mental illness.

The defense has conceded that he committed the crime, and is working on a risky defense that will combine traditional psychiatric testimony with the burgeoning field of “neurolaw,” which holds that there is a biological basis for behavior. Prosecutors have said that steps Mr. Braunstein took before the attack show his intent.

Mr. Braunstein’s lawyer, Robert Gottlieb, has said he would show color images of his client’s brain, called positron emission tomography, or PET, scans, that he said show that Mr. Braunstein had undiagnosed and, until his arrest, untreated paranoid schizophrenia that drove him to behave as he did.

Media whore . . .

Earlier: God Help Me If The Post Ever Notices My Hair, Leaving Brooklyn? Fuhgeddaboudit! They Do That?