Opinion ID: 222406
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Gabrion's Mental Disabilities and His Competence to Stand Trial

Text: The actual murder trial began on February 25, 2002, and ended on March 16, 2002. Beginning with pretrial matters three years before and throughout the trial, Gabrion consistently disrupted the proceedings in many ways. At oral argument before us on appeal, appellate counsel focused her argument primarily on the contention that Gabrion was incompetent to stand trialparticularly during the sentencing phase after he hit his lawyer in the face with his fist in front of the jury. The claim that Gabrion lost competence in the sentencing phase of the trial when he punched his lawyer in the face is belied by the testimony of Dr. Gregory Saathoff. He is a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Virginia. He testified on March 15, 2002, after Gabrion's attack on his lawyer. Saathoff testified in detail that Gabrion's behavior at trial was part of Gabrion's deviant personality characterized by a recurring pattern of deception and in this instance his effort to fake incompetence. [2] This evaluation after the attack was consistent with the evaluations of seven other mental health experts before the attack. For example, the first evaluation was given by Dr. Emily Fallis of the Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth in May 2000. She found Gabrion to be a sociopath, a man with an Antisocial Personalty Disorder [that] include[d] inability to follow rules and laws; lying and manipulating others; impulsivity; irritability and aggressiveness; and consistent irresponsibility. (Vol. VII, JA 2277.) Gabrion's behavior fits the checklist for severe psychopathy in the psychiatric literature that includes the following characteristics: 1. Glibness/superficial charm 2. Grandiose sense of self-worth 3. Need for stimulation 4. Pathological lying 5. Conning/manipulative 6. Lack of remorse or guilt 7. Shallow affect 8. Callous/lack of empathy 9. Parasitic lifestyle 10. Poor behavioral controls 11. Promiscuous sexual behavior 12. Lack of realistic, long-term goals 13. Impulsivity 14. Irresponsibility 15. Criminal versatility Kent A. Kiehl, A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective on Psychopathy: Evidence for Paralimbic System Dysfunction, Elsevier 107, 109 (2006), available at www.sciencedirect.com by searching for author. From the early pretrial proceedings, Gabrion sought to represent himself without a lawyer. He began to inundate the magistrate judge with letters and writings saying that his lawyers were Satanic and trying to frame him. He refused to cooperate with his appointed lawyers by providing information. He harassed them. For example, he called the office of one of his lawyers more than 80 times on a single day while continuing to inundate court staff with letters and phone calls. He continues this process on appeal by sending voluminous writings and letters to this court. On occasion, he called the district judge an evil Hitler and said in court that the judge was having sex with a 14-year-old girl and had gotten a 13-year-old girl pregnant. He insulted the jury. He came to court dirty with black marks over his forehead and the letters AZZA on his forehead. On some occasions during the trial, Gabrion's conduct became so unruly that the court had to expel him from the courtroom and allow him to return restrained at the wrists and legs. As a precaution, Gabrion had to sit between two marshals when he was allowed to return to the courtroom after striking his lawyer in the face. Typically he made observations to the courtroom audience like the following: I am sorry to be forced to be represented by evil shysters in a kangaroo court in a prostitute evil nation that murders its babies by abortion. And I'll be quiet because I am being forced to just as if I were in Nazi Germany. These are but a few examples of many instances of similar behavior during the course of the trial. Gabrion's appellate counsel argues that the only solution to the problem of Gabrion's efforts to disrupt the proceedings from the beginning of the proceedings in 1999, including his attack on his lawyer in March 2002, to the present time is to order a new competency hearing. Counsel concludes that the District Court committed reversible error and denied Gabrion due process by refusing to hold a competency hearing during the sentencing phase of the case. We do not agree because the psychiatric and mental health records in the case convince us, as they did the District Court, that Gabrion knew what he was doing. He was malingeringdefined in psychiatric literature as the intentional production of false or grossly exaggerated physical or psychological symptoms motivated by external incentives, as explained in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). He was faking incompetence in order to disrupt the trial. [3] Malingering, faking incompetence, trying to deceive the court, pathological lying and murder are signs of a mental illness that thankfully affects only a small part of the population; but it is not the same as the mental illness that gives rise to incompetence to stand trial. Incompetence is described as a mental illness causing the defendant to be unable to understand the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him or to assist properly in his defense. 18 U.S.C. § 4241(a). The District Court must order a competency hearing only when it has reasonable cause to believe the defendant is incompetent. Id. Given the outcome of all of Gabrion's previous evaluations and the persistent finding of his malingering, no such reasonable cause existed. The deliberate refusal of an actor to assist counsel in order to appear crazylike playing the role of an idiot in a playmakes the actor incompetent on the stage but not in a real court of law. Gabrion retained his memory and sought to create the appearance of idiocy, imbecility, and loss of memory.