STEPHENVILLE, Tex. — Eddie Ray Routh, the mentally disturbed veteran who killed Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL marksman who inspired the movie “American Sniper,” was sentenced Tuesday to life in prison after a jury here found him guilty of murder, rejecting his claims that he was legally insane at the time.
Mr. Routh and his lawyers had argued that he was not guilty by reason of insanity and that he belonged not in prison but at a state mental hospital. His two-week trial for the killings of Mr. Kyle and Mr. Kyle’s friend Chad Littlefield in 2013 centered on Mr. Routh’s state of mind. Jurors had to decide whether Mr. Routh’s erratic behavior, his delusions about hybrid pig people and his heavy drug use were proof of insanity or evidence that he was troubled but criminally responsible.
With the death penalty off the table, the jury’s decision that Mr. Routh was guilty of capital murder left him facing only one possible sentence, and the judge issued it minutes after the verdict was announced — life in prison without parole.
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Mr. Routh, who worked as a prison guard and a weapons-maintenance specialist known as an armorer while in the Marines, told the experts who examined him that he had spent time in Iraq at Joint Base Balad, which he described as “plush” because it had a movie theater and other amenities. For the humanitarian mission in Haiti, he was aboard a ship most of the time, and none of the three experts said they believed Mr. Routh’s claims that he had seen or come into contact with the bodies of dead babies there.
“He said there was one time that he and another Marine thought they saw a body in the water, but they weren’t sure,” Dr. Price said of Mr. Routh’s deployment in Haiti in 2010. “He was exaggerating his experiences for some reason, either to shock other people or to get some reaction to them, or possibly part of his application for disability from the V.A.,” referring to the federal Department of Veterans Affairs.
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