Price v. Thurmer

637 F.3d 831, 2011 U.S. App. LEXIS 7890, 2011 WL 1458694
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
DecidedApril 18, 2011
Docket09-3851
StatusPublished
Cited by53 cases

This text of 637 F.3d 831 (Price v. Thurmer) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Price v. Thurmer, 637 F.3d 831, 2011 U.S. App. LEXIS 7890, 2011 WL 1458694 (7th Cir. 2011).

Opinion

POSNER, Circuit Judge.

This habeas corpus case is before us for the second time, after the remand for an evidentiary hearing that we ordered in Price’s first appeal. 514 F.3d 729 (7th Cir.2008). The origin of the case is a bizarre incident of mayhem in 1991. Price was driving his truck and struck a pedestrian. He continued driving, pursued by an off-duty police officer; slammed into the rear of another vehicle, causing a four-car pile-up; leapt out of his truck, swinging a machete; and injured three passersby with it before he was disarmed. He was growling and ranting, and when the police tried to subdue him he exhibited extraordinary strength and imperviousness to pain — he reacted neither to being pinned by an automobile nor to being shocked by a stun gun. Convicted by a jury in a Wisconsin state court of attempted murder and related crimes arising from the incident, he was sentenced to 185 years in prison. His lawyer had asked the jury to find him not guilty by reason of insanity, but the jury had refused.

Before appealing his conviction Price had initiated a state postconviction proceeding, contending among other things that his trial lawyer had been ineffective. After an evidentiary hearing the trial judge had rejected the complaint, as had the Wisconsin court of appeals, State v. Price, 2002 WL 563375 (Wis.App. Apr.17, 2002) (per curiam), which heard his direct and postconviction appeals simultaneously because his direct appeal had been delayed for six years by his public defender’s procrastination.

Having exhausted his state remedies, Price sought federal habeas corpus, but struck out in the district court. Our previous opinion affirmed the denial of relief on most of the grounds urged by him, but ordered an evidentiary hearing on his complaints about his lawyer’s waiving a hearing on Price’s mental competence to stand trial and failing to provide essential information to the court-appointed psychiatric witness. The district court conducted the hearing that we had directed, and again denied relief, precipitating this second appeal.

We begin with Price’s competence to stand trial. He had a long history of mental disease and had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, and his behavior during and immediately after the attack that led to his prosecution and conviction was consistent with insanity. His original lawyers had succeeded in getting the judge to agree to conduct a competency hearing, but they withdrew from the case at Price’s request before the hearing was scheduled to take place. His new lawyer, the one he’s complaining about, having been appointed just minutes before the hearing was scheduled to begin, asked for and was granted a 24-hour adjournment. The lawyer met with Price for three and a half hours during the adjournment, reviewed with him the court-ordered competency report (prepared by a Dr. Robert Miller), which had concluded that Price was competent to stand trial, and later testified that “there wasn’t any doubt in my mind that Mr. Price was competent, and he [Price] felt the same way.”

The fact that a person suffers from a mental illness does not mean that he’s incompetent to stand trial. He need only be able to follow the proceedings and provide the information that his lawyer *834 needs in order to conduct an adequate defense, and to participate in certain critical decisions, such as whether to appeal. Drope v. Missouri, 420 U.S. 162, 171-72, 95 S.Ct. 896, 43 L.Ed.2d 103 (1975); Dusky v. United States, 362 U.S. 402, 80 S.Ct. 788, 4 L.Ed.2d 824 (1960) (per curiam); Woods v. McBride, 430 F.3d 813, 817 (7th Cir.2005). If he is being treated successfully with antipsychotic drugs, as in Wilson v. Gaetz, 608 F.3d 347, 349 (7th Cir.2010), the fact that he has a mental illness (of which the drugs treat merely the symptoms) does not render him incompetent to stand trial. It is the difference between having asthma and having an asthmatic attack, or having coronary artery disease and having a heart attack. When the lawyer met and talked to Price, Price gave no signs of being in a manic state, as he had been during and right after his assaults with the machete. It’s unlikely that Dr. Miller would have changed his mind about Price’s competence to stand trial had the lawyer challenged his opinion.

At the oral argument of the present appeal Price’s lawyer ingeniously focused on his client’s alleged inability to recall the details of the machete attack. The ingenuity lay in the fact that such amnesia would be consistent with his being lucid during the trial, yet might make it impossible for him to assist his counsel meaningfully because he had forgotten the acts for which he was being prosecuted. The problem with such a contention is that the defendant who didn’t want to be tried right away might plead amnesia — and if years later he decided the time was now ripe for a trial because acquittal had become more likely might announce he’d regained his memory. There are tests for detecting false claims of amnesia, but “there is still ... no ‘gold standard’ measure for distinguishing between cases of genuine and feigned amnesia.” Xue Sun et al, “Does Feigning Amnesia Impair Subsequent Recall?,” 37 Memory & Cognition 81 (2009). False pleas of amnesia by criminal defendants are both common and difficult to detect. Marko Jelicic, Harald Merckelbach & Saskia van Bergen, “Symptom Validity Testing of Feigned Amnesia for a Mock Crime,” 19 Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology 525 (2004).

We do not suggest that amnesia can never operate as a defense to competence to stand trial. But something more than the defendant’s word would have to be shown, given the ease of making such a claim, the difficulty of countering it, and hence the temptation to abuse it. See United States v. Andrews, 469 F.3d 1113, 1118-19 (7th Cir.2006); cf. United States v. No Runner, 590 F.3d 962, 965 and n. 2 (9th Cir.2009); United States v. Villegas, 899 F.2d 1324, 1341 (2d Cir.1990).

Consistent with our skepticism about a claim of amnesia, Price’s lawyer testified that he had concluded on the basis of his meeting with Price to discuss competence to stand trial that Price “was able to help me.” Ability to assist one’s lawyer is the test of competence to stand trial.

We move on to the issue of Price’s mental condition during his bout of violence. The issue has narrowed to whether the bout was a psychotic episode attributable to his paranoid schizophrenia, or was caused by “acute delirium” attributable to voluntary consumption of alcohol or mind-altering drugs. If the latter he would (with exceptions not claimed to be applicable to this case) be ineligible to be found not guilty by reason of insanity. State v. Kolisnitschenko, 84 Wis.2d 492, 267 N.W.2d 321, 324 (1978); see Wis. Stat.

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Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
637 F.3d 831, 2011 U.S. App. LEXIS 7890, 2011 WL 1458694, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/price-v-thurmer-ca7-2011.