Jarrod Ramos, the Maryland man charged with gunning down five people in the Capital Gazette newsroom in June 2018, is pleading guilty but not criminally responsible for the attack by reason of insanity.

The new plea came during a pretrial hearing Monday in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court. Attorney Katy O’Donnell said Ramos is pleading guilty to all 23 charges he was indicted on, including five counts of first-degree murder.

Judge Laura Ripken accepted his plea, and said she determined that Ramos “freely, knowingly and voluntarily” waived his right to a jury trial to determine his guilt or innocence.

The new plea means the legal case against him will skip a first phase of determining guilt and move automatically to a second phase of determining whether he is criminally responsible.

Wearing green jail clothes and a long beard, Ramos stood in court and repeatedly answered “that is correct” when asked by the judge whether he understood he was giving up his right to the first phase of his trial to determine whether he committed the crimes.

Ramos, 39, had originally pleaded both not guilty and not criminally responsible, which is Maryland’s version of an insanity defense.

The judge said at a pretrial hearing last week that a report from the state health department has found Ramos to be legally sane. Attorneys for Ramos have said experts on the defense team reached a different conclusion.

As part of the hearing Monday, a prosecutor read a “statement of facts” to the judge, laying out details of the state’s case against Ramos that would have been used at his trial were he not pleading guilty.

Anne Colt Leitess, the state’s attorney prosecuting the case, described in a statement of facts how Ramos gave himself up to police. “I surrender. I surrender. I’m your shooter,” Ramos said, according to Leitess’ statement of facts, which she read in court.

Family members of the victims wept and comforted each other as the prosecutors described the attack inside the newsroom. Ramos sat passively.

Rachael Pacella, a Capital Gazette staffer who survived the shooting by hiding between file cabinets, said Ramos’ guilty plea brought a “big emotional relief” for her. “I definitely feel a little bit better and a little bit lighter after this plea,” she said.

Rick Hutzell, the newspaper’s editor, said he hopes Ramos’ guilty plea provides some comfort to the survivors of the shootings and relatives of the five employees who were killed. But he said he doesn’t know if it brings any justice. “There is no justice for the dead,” Hutzell said.

Phil Davis, a former Capital Gazette reporter who survived the shooting and now works as a reporter at The Baltimore Sun, told reporters outside the courthouse that he used to cover trials in the same courthouse where Ramos pleaded guilty.

“He did not necessarily stand out as much,” Davis said. “It felt almost as if I was there to cover someone else’s trial. I did not have any sort of visceral reaction to him. He was another defendant to me.”

Ramos’ plea change came just days before jury selection in his murder trial was set to begin.

A hearing to determine whether Ramos is criminally responsible would begin in November. If Ramos were found not criminally responsible, he would be committed to a maximum-security psychiatric hospital.

Police said Ramos shot his way inside the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland, on June 28, 2018, and fatally wounded journalists Gerald Fischman, Robert Hiaasen, John McNamara and Wendi Winters, as well as advertising assistant Rebecca Smith.

When Ramos was captured by police, officials said he was hiding under a desk inside the newsroom.

Ramos had a long history of harassing the news outlet’s staff following an unsuccessful defamation suit he filed against the paper in 2012, according to authorities.

Police said Ramos was angered that the Capital Gazette had reported on his guilty plea to a misdemeanor harassment charge several years before. A former high school classmate had alleged he was stalking and harassing her.

After his defamation suit was thrown out, authorities said he engaged in a yearslong tirade against the news outlet. Letters that threatened the newsroom and were signed with Ramos’ name were received by area judges and an attorney in the days following the shooting.

Since he was indicted in July 2018, much of the legal proceedings in the case have centered on Ramos’ mental state at the time of the shooting.

After his plea of not criminally responsible last spring, Ripken ordered Ramos to receive an evaluation at the Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center, a maximum security forensic psychiatric hospital. The evaluation was to determine Ramos’ competency to stand trial and criminal responsibility.

In a pretrial hearing last week, the judge said the report indicated Ramos is criminally responsible.

WTOP’s Dick Uliano and Megan Cloherty contributed to this report.