Additions announced this week include a former Food and Drug Administration investigator, a suicide expert and an Irish psychiatrist who has criticized the use of antidepressant medication by children.

Pittman is charged with murdering his grandparents, Joe Frank Pittman and Joy Roberts Pittman, in their Chester County home in November 2001, when he was 12. He will be tried as an adult and could be sentenced to life in prison if convicted.

The centerpiece of Pittman's defense will be the argument that an adverse reaction to antidepressants caused the boy's violent behavior. Pittman had been on a five-week regimen of Paxil and Zoloft, both antidepressants classified as selective reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs.

Former drug reviewer to help

Dr. Richard Kapit, a retired FDA drug reviewer, read an article about Pittman's case on the front page of The New York Times in late August, then contacted Andy Vickery, one of the boy's attorneys.

"I thought I was in a position to help out, and I was concerned if it was a drug-induced event, the kid could be put away for life," Kapit said Friday. "I felt like I was in a good position to evaluate this issue."

Kapit, who retired from the FDA in 2002 after 16 years with the agency, worked on reviewing safety and efficacy issues for Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft when the three SSRIs were being brought to market in the late 1980s.

He has said the benefit for the drugs outweighed any potential risk to adult patients but believes the drugs can cause some patients to become manic, which can lead to suicidal or homicidal thoughts and behavior.

"In the psychiatric profession, antidepressants have always been thought to cause manic episodes," Kapit said. "Now, we have hard data to back up what everyone sort of believed."

Kapit was referring to three reviews of clinical trial data provided by drug companies presented at a FDA hearing in September that showed some children and adolescents taking antidepressants may develop suicidal thoughts or actions because of the drugs.

Two advisory panels have recommended the agency place strict warnings about use of the antidepressants in children on labels for doctors, parents and patients. The FDA has yet to act.

Kapit traveled from his home in Maryland to Columbia last week and met with Pittman for two days at the Department of Juvenile Justice detention center where he's being held. Kapit said he also went over the boy's psychiatric evaluation reports and medical records "with a fine-tooth comb" and says he believes Pittman's violent behavior is linked to his antidepressant medication.

Kapit declined to discuss what his testimony will be during the trial.

Vickery, the only attorney to win a jury decision against a drug company in an antidepressant case involving violence and suicide, called Kapit a "front-line guy" at the FDA.

"He says we're right and he's going to testify," said Vickery, whose law firm is in Houston.

Suicide expert, psychiatrist

Other additions include Ronald Maris, a suicide expert and professor emeritus at the University of South Carolina. Maris will argue the biological link between SSRIs and violence.

Also available to the defense team is Dr. David Healy, the Irish psychiatrist who is the head of the North Wales Department of Psychological Medicine. Healy has conducted clinical trials for antidepressants and has been a part of many legal cases involving antidepressants and behavioral problems. That has given him access to unpublished data from drug companies, Vickery said.

Already retained for Pittman's defense is Dr. Peter Breggin, a psychiatrist from Ithica, N.Y., who has raised questions about potential safety problems with antidepressants in books such as "Talking Back to Prozac" and "The Antidepressant Factbook."

Other members of Pittman's defense team include attorneys Henry Mims of Greer and Karen Barth Menzies of Los Angeles. Menzies' law firm, Baum Hedlund, represents hundreds of clients in civil lawsuits involving antidepressant medication.

Richland County Solicitor Barney Giese will be prosecuting the case, and Circuit Court Judge Daniel Pieper of North Charleston will preside over the trial. No date has been set for the trial to begin, but Pieper has said it could come by the end of October or early November.