Item — HN Reader

It gets difficult when you are determined to be mentally competent to stand trial, but you are clearly not mentally competent enough to make legal decisions.

> State psychiatric experts found McCoy mentally competent to stand trial.

> McCoy suffered from diminished mental capacity

> people who represent themselves in major criminal trials often have enormous mental health problems and imperception of reality.

It is a very, very high bar these days in order to be found mentally incompetent, and as there is no social safety net, the mentally incompetent are disproportionately prosecuted via the legal system.

1 comments

I thought one of the bars for being mental competence _was_ something about being competent enough to play a role in your legal defense?

This seems more like the court thought he was fine and the lawyer decided the guy was mentally incompetent himself, which, given the article lists several other mistakes the lawyer apparently made, this sounds like he just was kind of a crappy/lazy lawyer.

In case anyone thinks I'm not considering the difficulties faced by overworked public defenders, I here ya, but the lawyer that screwed all this up was retained by his parents.

> He briefly acted as his own lawyer until his parents hired Larry English to defend him, and even then, the defendant continued to file motions in his own defense. English repeatedly advised McCoy to plead guilty in exchange for life in prison, but McCoy repeatedly refused, insisting that he was innocent. Finally, English embarked on a strategy of conceding his client's guilt, in hopes of avoiding the death penalty."

> I thought one of the bars for being mental competence _was_ something about being competent enough to play a role in your legal defense?

Right, but it sounds like a big part of the problem here is that the bar is set very high here, perhaps more than is reasonable.