Bipolar vs. Domestic Abuse

In an interview with Tallahassee lawyer James P. Waczewski  almost three years after the trial, Prosecutor Georgia Cappleman said that when it came to selecting the jury, she wanted people who understood the cycles of domestic abuse. 

But what was never brought out at the trial or by the media was that Samira Frasch was bipolar. The anomalies of their marriage weren’t caused by domestic abuse, they were caused by her manic and mixed episodes. 

In an inexcusable twist of irony, it had been suggested by authorities that it was Dr. Frasch who was bipolar and needed to be on medication before he could appear in court.   It was part of the prosecution’s efforts to hold Dr. Frasch in jail while they built a case against him. Over five years after Samira’s death, in the interview with Waczewski, Cappleman says she “wasn’t familiar with any particular diagnosis that he had for a mental health problem.” 

She admits, “I think we felt like the case was going to be difficult to prove. We were struggling with, you know, how and when to charge it. We initially arrested him for interference with child custody just to hold him so we could try to build this murder case. So we felt at the time that the strength of the evidence was not going to be sufficient to pursue the death penalty and the aggravators simply weren’t there.”

So, instead, the prosecutor created a story of domestic abuse. When selecting the jury,  she said, “I would always talk extensively about domestic violence issues and whether folks had strong feelings about domestic violence or had been personally touched by it and whether people were familiar with the types of cycles that people who are involved in a domestic violence relationship go through. So they need to understand why she was with him after everything she had been through, why she was with him that day, why she agreed to go out-of-town with him, why was she in the car with him. That sort of thing.”

The flaw with that was that the Frasches weren’t living out the cycle of domestic abuse. Dr. Frasch wasn’t in that phase where the abuser is charming and trying to be normal while he plans out his next abusive move. Dr. Frasch was trying to heal a marriage wounded by Samira’s bipolar condition that had most notably led to a violent outburst of violence against him the previous August when Samira had been arrested for aggravated assault. 

After that, he had worked on reconciling with the requests that she get counselling and that she get back on medication.