A Suffolk Superior Court jury is weighing the fate of CHRISTIAN KARL GERHARTSREITER (D.O.B. 2/21/61), who allegedly kidnapped his daughter during a post-divorce visitation last summer, assaulted a social worker monitoring that visit, and gave the assumed name of Clark Rockefeller upon his arrest by Boston Police and FBI agents last summer.

“This is not a case about sanity,” Assistant District Attorney David Deakin said during closing arguments this morning. “This is a case about control.”

Deakin rejected what he called a “preposterous diagnosis” by defense witnesses, telling jurors that the defendant was not suffering from a mental disease or defect when he undertook plans to kidnap his 7-year-old daughter – whom the courts had placed in his ex-wife’s custody – and “regain at least as much of that control as he could.”

Deakin also urged jurors to remember that none of the psychological tests performed by three mental health experts revealed any major mental illness that would compromise the defendant’s ability to recognize the wrongfulness of his actions or prevent him from conforming his behavior to the dictates of the law.

“He didn’t make a move until all the getaway cars were in place,” he said, though he had ample opportunity to take his daughter at any time that day, the previous day, or several months earlier, when he had cancelled a visitation because he was “too busy.”

Deakin recalled the testimony of one getaway driver, who told the court that Gerhartsreiter had ordered her not to stop or answer her phone on their drive away from the abduction “to make sure that she wouldn’t know about the Amber Alert he knew would be coming.” He reminded jurors that Gerhartsreiter had adopted a litany of non-Rockefeller aliases before, during, and after the kidnapping scheme, but that not one of the three mental health experts who interviewed him believed them to be delusional identities.

Gerhartsreiter stuck with that identity because it was the name under which he met and married his wife, allowing him to enjoy “the lavish lifestyle to which he had become accustomed,” Deakin said. “As soon as the divorce is settled and he has his settlement, he returns to a lifelong pattern of moving to a new city with a new identity.”

Deakin responded to the suggestion that Gerhartsreiter was compelled to kidnap his daughter out of love or mental illness with the fact that the defendant didn’t contact her once between the time she was placed in her mother’s custody and their first visitation.

“He didn’t send her a card,” Deakin said. “He didn’t send her an email. He didn’t send her a letter” even though he had the right to do so.

“Don’t let this insanity defense be the culminating manipulation in a lifetime of lies,” the prosecutor told jurors.

Gerhartsreiter is charged with custodial kidnapping for his daughter’s July 27, 2008, abduction; assault and battery for allegedly shoving to the ground the social worker monitoring their visit; assault and battery with a dangerous weapon for allegedly directing his getaway driver to speed away from the scene even as that social worker clung to the vehicle; and providing a false name – Clark Rockefeller – to police upon his arrest.

Gerhartsreiter was taken into custody in a Baltimore residence he had bought with a portion of his divorce settlement. Inside that residence were hundreds of thousands of dollars – some of it case, but most in untraceable gold coins Gerhartsreiter had obtained in advance of the abduction.

The defendant is represented by attorneys Jeffrey Denner and Timothy Bradl. Judge Frank Gaziano is presiding in courtroom 906. Jurors have retired for the day and will resume their deliberations tomorrow morning.