Buddha made me do it

A defense attorney told jurors Monday that they'll have two choices when determining the fate of a Japanese man accused of stabbing a British biologist at a Santa Fe conference earlier this year.

They could find that Kazuki Hirano, 34, suffers from paranoid schizophrenia and was unable to control himself when he plunged a knife into Rupert Sheldrake's thigh at a La Fonda ballroom April 2, public defender Matt Swessinger said during opening arguments in Hirano's trial.

Or, he said, jurors could determine Sheldrake, who is known for his experiments in mental telepathy, was actually controlling Hirano's mind " as Hirano has repeatedly asserted " and that Hirano acted in self-defense when he attacked Sheldrake.

Either way, Hirano " who is charged with attempted first-degree murder " is not guilty, Swessinger said.

Prosecutor Matt Cantou Clarke had a different take on the incident.

He said Hirano approached Sheldrake the day before the incident and asked Sheldrake for help with the voices in his head, which Hirano called "mental invasions." Sheldrake told him to try Buddhism, Clarke said.

"The defendant perceives this as the wrong answer," he said. "The defendant got angry. He felt wronged ... and he decided to wrong the victim in return for it."

So Hirano armed himself with a knife and sat in the front row as Sheldrake delivered the keynote speech on the last day of the 10th International Conference on Science and Consciousness, "waiting for a chance to strike," Clarke said.

When Sheldrake finished, he said, Hirano left his seat and lunged at the biologist, trying to stab him in the chest. However, Hirano tripped on someone or something and ended up stabbing Sheldrake in the thigh, Clarke said, showing jurors bloody pictures of the wound.

The prosecutor said it would be critical for jurors to look at the first interaction between Sheldrake and Hirano. That's because Hirano didn't ask Sheldrake to stop controlling his mind at that time. Rather, he merely asked him for help with the voices in his head, Clarke said.

In a jailhouse interview in September, Hirano told a New Mexican reporter about that first interaction.

"I'm asking him how to stop telepathy remote," Hirano said. "He is kind of lying to me, and he is laughing and kind of smiling like he looks at me stupid and then walks away."

In letters, telephone conversations and two interviews at the Santa Fe County jail, Hirano has insisted he is a "guinea pig" in Sheldrake mind-control experiments that utilize "remote mental telepathy."