Opinion ID: 1057585
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Evidence at the Competency Hearing

Text: Mr. Irick presented two witnesses at the competency hearing: Dr. Peter Brown, a forensic psychiatrist, and Ms. Nina Lunn, a licensed social worker. Mr. Irick also introduced into evidence various exhibits related to his history of mental illness. Dr. Brown evaluated Mr. Irick on December 7, 2009, and January 21, 2010, meeting with Mr. Irick for almost six hours. [4] In addition to his own meetings with Mr. Irick, Dr. Brown also relied upon the neuropsychological testing and evaluation of Mr. Irick performed by Dr. D. Malcolm Spica, a licensed clinical psychologist and neuropsychologist, in November and December of 2009. Furthermore, Dr. Brown had reviewed Mr. Irick's school records, records from the various mental health facilities in which Mr. Irick had been institutionalized, records from the various mental health professionals who had treated and/or evaluated Mr. Irick during his life, portions of the transcripts and evidence offered at Mr. Irick's trial, portions of the proof introduced at the state post-conviction and federal habeas corpus proceedings, and records from the correctional facilities in which Mr. Irick has been incarcerated. Dr. Brown candidly testified that the purpose of his evaluation had been to determine Mr. Irick's mental status at the time of the murder and to identify any mitigating circumstances. While Dr. Brown was aware of the guidelines and standards set forth by the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law for the assessment of competence to be executed, he did not use these guidelines in a systematic way when conducting his evaluation. Furthermore, while Dr. Brown was aware of the competency standard outlined in Panetti, he did not focus upon this standard, explaining that it did not relate to what I was doing. As for Mr. Irick's competency to be executed, Dr. Brown testified, I don't have an opinion about that. When asked whether Mr. Irick has a rational understanding of why he's going to be put to death, Dr. Brown responded: The best answer that I can give is that his rational understanding of events is that of a child in the seven-to-nine-year-old range. So that by the legal standards are obviously not my business, but thehisthe capacity of his brain to work in forming a rational understanding is in that of a pre-adolescent child. Dr. Brown confirmed, however, that Mr. Irick was able to engage in a coherent conversation. Additionally, Dr. Brown agreed that a seven-to-nine-year-old child understands the concepts of doing wrong and receiving punishment. Concerning Mr. Irick's mental condition generally, Dr. Brown testified that Mr. Irick has suffered from a lifelong severe psychiatric illness and that at the time of the offense he was suffering from psychosis. Through Dr. Brown, Mr. Irick introduced evidence concerning his past diagnoses of mental illness, evidence of his potentially violent actions during his teenage years, and evidence of his psychotic behavior around the time of the victim's murder. Dr. Brown diagnosed Mr. Irick as suffering from a psychotic disorder not otherwise specified. [5] This psychotic disorder is a condition manifested by gross perceptual and thinking deficits, such as hallucinations, delusions, and gross disorganization of behavior. Dr. Brown believed that Mr. Irick's expressed inability to remember the offense was genuine; he did not believe Mr. Irick was malingering or pretending to have lost his memory. Dr. Brown opined that Mr. Irick's inability to remember the offense is the result of the psychotic episode Mr. Irick was experiencing at the time of the offense. Dr. Brown explained that persons suffering psychoses typically do not have good recollection of events occurring during psychotic episodes. At the same time, Dr. Brown acknowledged that Mr. Irick is able to recall events from his childhood, from the evening of the murder, and from his trial. Dr. Brown also acknowledged that during psychological evaluations conducted not long after the crime, Mr. Irick admitted he had been drinking alcohol on the day of the offense and that he had felt angry, enraged, degraded, and humiliated by the family's request for him to babysit the children because he had planned to go out that evening. Dr. Brown opined that Mr. Irick's mental problems continue to the present time, although he agreed that Mr. Irick showed no evidence of thought disorder, acute hallucinations, or delusions during their interview. Dr. Brown's diagnosis was based on Mr. Irick's history; however, Dr. Brown acknowledged that there have been no documented episodes of psychosis during Mr. Irick's incarceration at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. Dr. Brown also acknowledged that Mr. Irick has responded well to the structured environment of prison and that he has not been prescribed anti-psychotic medication since adolescence. Dr. Brown opined that the best examples of Mr. Irick's psychotic behavior were contained in the lay affidavits provided by members of the victim's family in 1999 during federal habeas corpus proceedings. These affidavits related that Mr. Irick reported hearing voices, talked to himself, and acted violently toward others in the days leading up to the 1985 rape and murder of the victim. Specifically, the persons providing these affidavits stated that Mr. Irick talked aloud to himself and told family members that he was receiving commands from the devil and hearing other voices telling him what to do. Mr. Irick also professed to hearing police sirens and warned family members to protect themselves because the police were coming to kill them. On another occasion, Mr. Irick was seen in broad daylight with a machete chasing a girl with whom he had no relationship down the street. On another occasion, Mr. Irick was found with a machete inside the house where he and the victim's step-father were living and, when asked about the machete, said that he was going to kill his friend, the victim's step-father. Dr. Brown agreed that these affidavits constituted the most recent reports of any psychotic episodes. Dr. Brown acknowledged that Mr. Irick denied having any memory of the events recounted in the affidavits and further denied having any psychological impairment. Dr. Brown explained that a person suffering from paranoia and psychosis has a tendency to minimize or deny symptoms, meaning the most reliable information is typically the reports of third parties witnessing the symptoms. In Dr. Brown's view, all the data from Mr. Irick's childhood, including a report that at age six he expressed fear of his own impulses and felt threatened by those in his environment, were consistent with a severe psychiatric condition. Dr. Brown explained that psychotic symptoms tend to wax and wane according to circumstances, with emotional conflict serving as a trigger for a psychotic episode. Dr. Brown opined that the marital strife between the victim's mother and step-father at the time of the murder likely amounted to a trigger for Mr. Irick's pyschosis. Dr. Brown also diagnosed Mr. Irick as suffering from cognitive disorder not otherwise specified, a condition manifested by significant problems in the processing of information that does not meet the criteria for a specific diagnosis of a dementia, such as Alzheimer's, and that has no alternative explanation. This diagnosis was based upon the neuropsychological testing performed by Dr. Spica and was consistent with Mr. Irick's history. The neuropsychological testing indicated gross impairment in Mr. Irick's executive function, relating to his ability to integrate information from various processes in order to make decisions, to plan, and to control impulses. A person having this disorder, Dr. Brown explained, would not be able to resist paranoid delusions or command hallucinations. Dr. Brown further explained that this condition affects memory. Mr. Irick also has gross deficit in language function, Dr. Brown stated, meaning that his ability to use words as props to structure memory is impaired. While Dr. Brown ruled out schizophrenia, he diagnosed Mr. Irick with paranoid and schizoid personality disorders. According to Dr. Brown, the paranoid personality disorder manifests itself in Mr. Irick's inability to evaluate people because of his level of suspiciousness and his tendency to be looking for attacks, verbal, physical, whatever ... from a variety of different places at different times. Dr. Brown testified that the schizoid personality disorder manifests itself in Mr. Irick's gross disorganization. Dr. Brown opined that it is impossible to find a time in Mr. Irick's life when he was succeeding at meeting the goals and standards of his age group and that his primary way of coping has been to withdraw from people. Overall, Dr. Brown found evidence of two significant features based on his diagnoses of four psychological disorders. One is a lifelong severe psychiatric illness and evidence of episodes from reliable reporters of some of the most severe and the most dangerous psychiatric symptoms. The second is the clear evidence of gross impairment of Mr. Irick's ability to control, plan, and effectively execute or refrain from engaging in behavior with his cognitive disorder. Nevertheless, when Dr. Brown asked Mr. Irick about his general understanding of his present situation, Mr. Irick explained that he was on death row and expected to be executed. Mr. Irick expressed awareness of the offense he had committed and the victim's name, and he understood Dr. Brown's explanation of his own role and the reason Dr. Brown was examining Mr. Irick and preparing a report for the court. The second witness for Mr. Irick, Nina Braswell Lunn, was a licensed social worker who had interviewed Mr. Irick in 1965, when he was a child. The sole subject of Ms. Lunn's testimony was Mr. Irick's childhood psychiatric problems and institutionalizations. Ms. Lunn had not seen Mr. Irick since 1967. The State presented one witness at the hearing, Dr. Bruce G. Seidner, a clinical and forensic psychologist. Dr. Seidner interviewed and tested Mr. Irick on August 14 and 15, 2010, the weekend before the hearing, for a total of twelve and a half hours. Dr. Seidner also prepared a written report that the State introduced into evidence. Dr. Seidner explained that the purpose of his examination was to evaluate Mr. Irick's competence for execution. Dr. Seidner stated that he had followed the professional guidelines for assessing competence to be executed in conducting his evaluation. Dr. Seidner acknowledged Mr. Irick's long history of mental illness and substance dependence; and he considered Mr. Irick's background of behavioral, psychological, and substance abuse problems when forming his opinion on competence for execution. However, Dr. Seidner's evaluation focused upon Mr. Irick's current mental status, not his mental status at the time of the offense. According to Dr. Seidner, Mr. Irick was entirely cooperative during the evaluation. Mr. Irick voluntarily and knowingly signed a consent form. When asked if he knew why Dr. Seidner was there, Mr. Irick replied, Yeah. Yeah. One side wants to kill me, and one side wants to save me, and you know, you'reyou're here to interview me to see if I'm competent to be executed. Dr. Seidner had no doubt that Mr. Irick knew what we were about. Dr. Seidner opined that Mr. Irick fully understood the history of his litigation and felt that substantive errors had been made in his case. Mr. Irick believed, given the structure, and procedure, and rules of court, that he has now run out of road. Mr. Irick told Dr. Seidner that he intends to fight to the end, which Mr. Irick views as his execution on December 7, 2010. Dr. Seidner confirmed that Mr. Irick knows the date of his execution, the victim's name, the victim's relationship to her family and to him, and his relationship to the victim's family. Mr. Irick admitted that he had been angry with the family about being asked to babysit on the night of the murder and said that he had been drinking and using marijuana that day. Mr. Irick maintained his innocence of the crime, however, and suggested that the victim's stepfather was the killer. Despite Mr. Irick's profession of innocence, Dr. Seidner opined that there is no question Mr. Irick understood that he had been convicted of the victim's murder and that he had received the death penalty as punishment for that crime. Dr. Seidner and Mr. Irick also talked for some time about the death penalty and the pendency of Mr. Irick's death. Mr. Irick discussed the politics of the death penalty and his trial and expressed concern regarding the inconsistent application and the rationale for the death penalty. Still, according to Dr. Seidner, Mr. Irick was well aware of the sense of closure that families of victims might experience and of the justice of a life for a life. They also discussed Mr. Irick's views of death, which he described as a process of life. According to Dr. Seidner's report, Mr. Irick had adopted the Lakota Native American spiritual tradition before his incarceration. Mr. Irick believes that everything has a purpose and reason relative to the plans and intentions of the Creator. During his incarceration he has developed himself as an artist, and he is gratified by creating and sharing his paintings as gifts. Mr. Irick expressed his belief that everyone is born with a death sentence, and each person makes the most of life within the constraints and opportunities that originate from the Creator. However, Mr. Irick did not believe in an afterlife and accepted that his life would end with his execution. In Dr. Seidner's words, He fully understands that if and when he is executed that is the end of his life. Mr. Irick explained that while he continues to pursue legal avenues, he also is realistic and has been contemplating his choice of death by electrocution or lethal injection. According to Dr. Seidner, Mr. Irick was knowledgeable of the facts related to both methods and believed that his choice among the two will likely be his last major life decision. Dr. Seidner administered an IQ test, which revealed that Mr. Irick was of average intelligence (full scale IQ of 97). While Mr. Irick described some memory deficits, Dr. Seidner did not observe any that were outside the range of age-related memory decline. Dr. Seidner found nothing he would describe as an impairment. According to Dr. Seidner, the personality test [6] results did not reflect that Mr. Irick was malingering but instead were indicative of Mr. Irick's tumultuous and traumatic life. Dr. Seidner opined that Mr. Irick was not an individual who was hallucinating and having ... delusory experiences. Dr. Seidner explained that Mr. Irick's relative deficits are in the speed of processing information and stated, He's pretty deliberate.... [H]e's not efficient but he's accurate. Dr. Seidner found relative strengths in Mr. Irick's abstract verbal capacity: He can put together ideas. He can abstract ideas, see their commonalities and differences and carry on pretty high level abstract discussions. On the basis of his evaluation, Dr. Seidner opined to a reasonable degree of psychological certainty that Mr. Irick is aware of the punishment he is about to suffer, that he understands the reason for that punishment, and that he has a rational understanding of his pending execution.