James Leon Guerrero and Joseph Cabrera Sablan potentially face the death penalty in the June 2008 slaying of Jose Rivera, a federal corrections officer at U.S. Penitentiary Atwater in California.
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But before the two Guam-born defendants get to their long-delayed trial, an appellate court must sort out a dispute over the hearing needed to establish Guerrero's mental competence.
"Until Mr. Guerrero's competency is ruled on by the court, and we know whether or not he's going to be still in the case as the co-defendant or not, we can't get forward with anything else," Assistant U.S. Attorney Dawrence Rice noted at an August 2011 hearing, the transcript shows.
Guerrero's attorneys want the competency hearing closed.
Sablan's attorneys, allied for the moment with federal prosecutors, want the hearing open. The hearing will determine whether Guerrero can understand the trial proceedings and potentially assist in his defense. It will not focus on his sanity at the time of the killing.
During an oral argument in San Francisco last month, attended by Rivera's mother and other family members, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals grilled attorneys. Their eventual decision, balancing the constitutional tension between public access to court proceedings and defendants' rights to fair trials, could shape how similar competency hearings may be handled throughout nine Western states.
"It's a complex matter, certainly, that no federal court has precisely dealt with before," Richard G. Novak, one of Guerrero's attorneys, said in an interview.
Sablan's attorney, Tivon Schardl, added in an e-mail that "whether the Ninth Circuit's ruling has broad importance would depend on a lot of things," including whether the judges dig into the merits or simply resolve the matter on technical jurisdiction grounds.
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Guerrero's IQ: 70
The mental competency hearing dispute has since exposed more details about Guerrero. His IQ score of 70 on one test identifies him as mildly mentally impaired; if confirmed, this would render him ineligible for the death penalty.
He was raised in a family rife with "physical and sexual abuse," according to a January 2012 defense brief, in which the defense psychologist also characterized him as exhibiting "intractable fluctuating grandiosity and paranoia." Court filings further make clear that defense attorneys have been scooping up evidence about dangerous conditions at the Atwater prison as well as information about the past conduct of the former warden, Dennis Smith.
Gangs were reportedly controlling cell assignments, investigators found in 2009. Intoxicants were "extremely easy" to obtain. Shanks, blades and picks were omnipresent; in the cell shakedown after Rivera's murder, guards seized 175 homemade weapons.
"(Smith) was responsible to some degree for the conditions that existed at Atwater, which the government, in (a) Board of Inquiry report, has said contributed to the homicide," Schardl argued at a June 8, 2011, hearing, a transcript shows.
Merced Sun-Star, 5/28/12