Crazy Eyes: The Discernment of Competence by a Federal Magistrate Judge
| Author | Jeffrey Manske; Mark Osler |
| Position | Federal magistrate judge in Waco, Texas; Professor of Law at Baylor University |
| Pages | 751-783 |
Jeffrey Manske is a federal magistrate judge in Waco, Texas, and a graduate of Baylor University and St. Mary's University Law School.
Mark Osler is Professor of Law at Baylor University and a graduate of the college of William & Mary and Yale Law School.
[T]he body makes countless demands upon us, and furthermore any sickness that may befall it hampers our pursuit of true being. Then too it fills us with desires and longings and fears and imaginations of all sorts, and such quantities of trash, that, as the common saying puts it, we really never have a moment to think about anything because of the body.
-Plato, Phaedo1
In a large city, it is a common experience: a poorly-dressed man approaches a tourist, trying to make eye contact. Following the tourist as he makes his way down a crowded sidewalk, the man asks if he can talk to the tourist for a moment. In that split second, the tourist must determine how to react. Is the man dangerous? Is he simply needy? Perhaps it is just another tourist needing directions? When we are the tourist, we probably are not aware of how it is we decide what to do-our decision is predicated on a complex web of recollections, presumptions, and observations. Our reaction does not rely on a set of memorized rules or training we have received, but on instinctual discernment.
This type of gut-level discernment is part of the job description for federal magistrate judges. At arraignments and initial appearances, they must evaluate, based solely on what they see and Page 752 hear, the mental competency of the stranger who has approached the bench and decide whether or not to commit the stranger/defendant for a competency evaluation.2 The magistrate judge must do this without the usual tools of judges: directive rules, guidelines, laws, and training. Rather, the person in the robe must rely on her own perceptions-her gut-in deciding whether or not to detain the defendant to allow for a psychiatric evaluation to determine competency. This may be the purest application in the whole of federal law of the simple and personal wisdom we seek in judges.
In the end, does it matter? After all, the magistrate judge is usually doing nothing more than committing the defendant to a hospital prison for a relatively short stay. The short and emphatic answer is that yes, it does matter. As Professor Rodney Uphoff has laid out previously,3 such competency evaluations are usually conducted as part of a hospitalization in a maximum-security institution with minimal treatment and can subject the defendant to a far greater deprivation of his liberty than if he were convicted of the crime with which he is charged.4
The initial decisions of whether to schedule a hearing on competence and whether or not to commit the defendant for evaluation are, of course, just the beginning of a much longer process. If the magistrate so orders, the initial commitment for evaluation is limited to thirty days, with possibility of a fifteen-day extension.5 At the conclusion of that commitment, the defendant is returned to court and a hearing is held on the issue. If the defendant is found incompetent, he can be committed again for four months to determine "whether there is a substantial Page 753 probability that in the foreseeable future he will attain the capacity to permit the trial to proceed."6 If at the end of that four months the court finds there is a substantial probability that the defendant will become competent, he can be further committed "for an additional reasonable period of time."7
The purpose of this article is to analyze this strikingly unique situation from a very personal standpoint-the decisions one such magistrate judge has made in three distinct cases that came before him. While a survey of many magistrates would certainly reveal a truer picture of the variety of ways this problem may be approached, our goal here is to allow some depth in describing one approach, as a way to flesh out the problems inherent in this function of the magistrate and to start a discussion of a more systemic way to address the problem of evaluating competency.
Part II of the article will briefly describe the history of the competency determination and the controlling law that has resulted. Part III will examine the role of the magistrate judge in evaluating competency under contemporary standards and contrast this task with others performed by federal judges. Part IV will discuss three individual cases and the decisions that were made, and Part V will set out the challenges this process presents to fairness, as well as possible remedies to some of those problems.
Prior to the enactment of a federal competency statute in 1949, which gave statutory authority to the court to determine competency at any time,8 the common law provided the court with this ability.9 In 1899, the Sixth Circuit recognized this common law rule allowing the trial court to bar proceedings against an Page 754 insane person at arraignment in the case of Youtsey v. United States:10
The statutes of the United States present no mode for the presentation and trial of an issue of present insanity, when presented in bar of an arraignment, trial, judgment, or execution, and we must look to the common law for guidance in practice. It is fundamental that an insane person can neither plead to an arraignment, be subjected to a trial, or, after trial, receive judgment, or after judgment, undergo punishment.11
Further, consistent with current practice, that same common law rule allowed that "if a person, after committing a crime, became insane, he was not arraigned during his insanity but was remitted to prison until such incapacity was removed."12
The roots of this doctrine appear to run deep in the law and were based on the emerging ideal that a defendant must be able to meaningfully interact with his attorney.13 Reflecting this,
Blackstone wrote that a madman should not be arraigned "because he is not able to plead to it with that advice and caution that he ought . . . for how can he make his defense?"14
Notably, while it seems clear that this common law power existed within American law, it is not known how widely it was employed. Some commentators seem to limit the doctrine to capital and treason cases, such as Sir Matthew Hale's oft-cited treatise, which was relied on as authority by the Sixth Circuit in Youtsey:15
If a man in his sound memory commits a capital offence, and before his arraignment he becomes absolutely mad, he ought not by law to be arraigned during such his phrenzy, but be remitted to prison until that incapacity be removed; the reason is because he cannot advisedly plead to the Page 755 indictment; and this holds as well in cases of treason, as felony . . . .16
In 1949, a bill addressing competence was passed by Congress, and thereafter the federal code expressly allowed for a judge to find a defendant incompetent.17 This law was promoted by the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the Judicial Conference, largely out of the concern that considerable numbers of federal prisoners were determined to be insane for the first time when they reported for service of their sentences, raising the inference that they had never been fit for trial.18 This reasoning, of course, suggests that judges were not broadly using the authority that was at least, at times, recognized under the common law.
Almost immediately, the new statute was attacked because, on its face, it seemed to allow for permanent commitment of pretrial defendants. As one district court held in granting a writ of habeas corpus, if the statute was valid:1920 Page 756
[A]n insane person charged with a criminal offense can be imprisoned for the rest of his life without any trial as to the issue of whether or not he committed an offense, but only as to the question of whether or not he was sane or insane at the time of the hearing.21
In an attempt to finesse this problem, in 1953 the Tenth Circuit construed the new statute so that it did not allow for the pretrial commitment of the permanently insane.22 In that case, a pretrial defendant was committed to the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri for observation and treatment and for a report on the defendant's condition to be prepared.23 The defendant was diagnosed as schizophrenic and was returned to the court with the report that he was incompetent and completely unable to cooperate with counsel.24 At that point, the defendant was re-committed until he was made competent or charges were dropped. The defendant then filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus, which the trial court denied.25 On appeal, a panel of the Tenth Circuit (over a dissent) found that the statute could not...
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