While the City Slept (18 page)

A
n interesting situation now developed. In
State of Washington v. Isaiah Kalebu,
the state had come to see Isaiah as mentally ill enough that he should not be put to death. However, it continued to see him as competent enough to stand trial. This was because Isaiah’s history of mental illness did not rise, as the King County prosecutor put it, “to the level of a defense against the criminal charges.”

Isaiah might have suffered from a serious mental disorder, and he might still be suffering from a serious mental disorder, but in the prosecutor’s mind Isaiah was also capable of understanding reality and making choices, which meant Isaiah could be held accountable for his actions. Isaiah’s attorneys saw things differently, and soon they were in front of Judge Hayden to discuss this.

Isaiah had first been brought to the King County Jail in the late summer of 2009. It was now the spring of the following year, and Isaiah’s other defense attorney, Ramona Brandes, was telling Judge Hayden that Isaiah was in a dire state of decompensation. The date: May 12, 2010. Brandes told the judge that Isaiah hadn’t been eating for twelve days and that he’d been observed curled up in a corner of his cell for twenty-four hours straight. She noted that although Isaiah didn’t believe he had any problems, at least four different mental health professionals had so far diagnosed him as bipolar. “He does seem to cycle in and out of demonstrating major symptoms in approximately a two-to-four-week cycle,” Brandes told the court. She said that earlier in the previous month she’d noticed
Isaiah had “a very aggressive demeanor,” as well as “some very demanding behaviors” and “poor grooming.” When she saw him a few weeks later, he “presented with a very flat affect. He exhibited signs of grandiosity in reference to himself as an emperor. He displayed paranoia and indicated that guards were encouraging suicide in the jail. He also had just had a suicide attempt three days earlier and was in a neck brace at the time.” With Isaiah in court with her, Brandes pointed to “items in his hair” and “residue on his face.” She said she was “gravely concerned.”

Under questioning from Judge Hayden, Isaiah said he hadn’t wanted to come to court on this morning. He was feeling “not good” about being there, and he confirmed he hadn’t been eating. “They’re poisoning my food,” he said. “And my water.” He said that he didn’t know how he felt about the possibility of going back to Western State but that his lawyer had told him he had to go. Judge Hayden didn’t request, and no one offered, an update on exactly what medications Isaiah was being prescribed. But the judge did ask Isaiah if he’d been taking his medication.

“No,” Isaiah said.

“Why?” Judge Hayden asked.

“I don’t know.”

“All right. I’ll sign an order for evaluation at Western State.”

—

Isaiah arrived back at Western State six days later. He remembered being there two years previous, during the hospitalization when he’d been diagnosed as bipolar, prescribed lithium and Zyprexa, and sent back to Judge Gain with his competency “restored.” He also appeared to remember the names of some of the Western State staff members, though it was later pointed out, in court, that he could have just been reading their name tags. He denied hearing voices or having hallucinations. He “reported a history of physical abuse by his father, and stated that his mother was an alcoholic.” He seemed to have an appropriate affect, and he told doctors his bad mood was connected to his present incarceration, which was now
in its tenth month. He requested to be placed on a coed ward. The request was denied. He discussed the details of his case in a way that made clear he understood both the charges against him and his legal options, and, as usual, he insisted on his sanity. “I know I’m not crazy, but I am willing to do my time here,” Isaiah told a nurse. “I was sent here because I tried to hang myself in jail.” That was not exactly it. Isaiah was sent to Western State because his attorneys believed he was decompensating and perhaps not competent to stand trial.

That same afternoon, a nurse wrote, “Patient approached me as I was serving lunch, asking to clean tables for extra food. I let him know that I did my own cleanups at mealtimes. ‘Then just give me something extra.’ I explained to him why I couldn’t, and he walked away. He returned in a few minutes pointing to a tray on the counter, asking for it. He was told no once again. ‘Come on, you can bend or break any rule you want.’ Behaviors reported to charge nurse.”

This lunchtime interaction was later used by Western State doctors as evidence that Isaiah believed normal rules didn’t apply to him, and while it could be the case that Isaiah believed this, there is another possible explanation for the interaction: hunger. Isaiah hadn’t been eating for twelve days before he was ordered down to Western State. There is no evidence in the Western State report that doctors there were aware of this, and the hospital will not discuss specific cases because of medical privacy concerns.

—

Judge Hayden had authorized this stay at Western State to last up to fifteen days. On Isaiah’s fourth day at Western State, he was returned to the King County Jail with a finding that he had no mental illness whatsoever. “Mr. Kalebu showed no active or acute symptoms of either psychosis, depression, or mania despite being on no psychiatric medications,” stated the seven-page report from Western State. It acknowledged that two years prior two other doctors at Western State had diagnosed Isaiah as
“Bipolar NOS,” meaning bipolar not otherwise specified. But, the report went on, “without any psychiatric medication treatment currently or in the interim,” Isaiah was no longer displaying any symptoms that would warrant that diagnosis. His “most significant clinical issue,” according to Western State, was “his character pathology.” That character pathology, in the opinion of the state doctors: antisocial personality disorder. This was supported by the idea that Isaiah believed normal rules didn’t apply to him, and it included, the Western State doctors said, “lack of remorse for the effects of his actions upon others.”

Isaiah now arrived back at the King County Jail, deemed competent to stand trial and, essentially, viewed by Western State as a sociopath. While this was seen as a pathological character deficiency, Isaiah did not have, in Western State’s opinion, any “major mental illness” that should prevent his participation in legal proceedings. To underscore this point, Western State said that if Isaiah were to be found innocent of the crimes against Teresa and Jennifer, there would, legally speaking, be no reason to have him undergo a mental health evaluation upon release, because there was no mental illness for which to evaluate him. He could simply be returned to society to wander among the other innocent sociopaths.

—

Isaiah refused to come to court to discuss these findings. “Convey to Mr. Kalebu,” Judge Hayden said, “my sentiments that refusal to attend court proceedings will not become a pattern in this case.” In another statement he ordered to be conveyed to Isaiah, the judge added, “If forced to, I can require the jail to bring him down without his consent.”

“Understood, Your Honor,” said Schwartz.

“I expect him to be here at the next hearing.”

Isaiah was there for the next hearing, and events continued to demonstrate the considerable challenges in handling a dynamic mental disorder within the static realm of the legal system. While Western State had seen a calm and focused Isaiah over a span of four days, right off the bat Judge
Hayden wanted to know, “Is there any evidence that between the time he was evaluated and today he has decompensated in any fashion?” The judge, it seems, was entertaining the possibility that Isaiah, as his defense attorney had observed, was someone who cycled in and out of symptoms.

“Nothing that we feel free to present to the court, Your Honor,” Schwartz said.

Isaiah was quiet at this hearing. But, Judge Hayden noted, “he seems aware of his surroundings, at least from his image.” When Isaiah was asked if he wanted to say anything about the Western State report, he shook his head no.

Judge Hayden ruled him competent to stand trial.

—

As in the outside world, within the criminal justice system Isaiah was experiencing a fragmented approach in the way people were dealing with him. Western State believed one thing about his mental state. His defense attorneys appeared to sense another thing but were legally constrained by their responsibilities to their client. Judge Hayden, because of legal, strategic, and administrative factors mostly beyond his control, was not being updated on Isaiah’s current medications. In addition, Judge Hayden was not a psychiatrist, as he would repeatedly point out. As a consequence, within the criminal justice system the interests of Isaiah’s mental health and the interests of the law kept cycling in and out of alignment at the same time that Isaiah was cycling in and out of his various dispositions. Asked whether all of this might contribute to a defendant’s disturbance, Judge Hayden later said to me, “The system on the crazies is crazy? Well, I’m not gonna disagree with that too much.”

It continued. A month passed, and Isaiah was back in court over a concern about the jail’s interfering with his communications with his lawyers. The concern was quickly remedied but not to Isaiah’s satisfaction. “I’m a political prisoner,” he said. “This is bullshit. You guys are holding me against my will. I’m the king of America and not—this is
ridiculous. No, I’m the king of America. You’re holding me against my will. No, this is bullshit.”

The next month, at the request of his defense attorneys, Isaiah was examined by Dr. David Dixon, a forensic psychologist, to try to determine his state of mind at the time of the attacks. Isaiah had insisted he did not want to pursue a mental health defense, sometimes known as an “insanity defense,” and Dr. Dixon didn’t get very far in his effort. He met with Isaiah in the King County Jail in the late summer of 2010, at a time when Isaiah was on suicide watch, dressed in a white ultra-security uniform, his hands and feet shackled, his facial hair grown out. He wasn’t being allowed a mattress in his cell, only a blanket, and was frequently being dressed in a “suicide smock,” a flop of fabric with no strands or clasps that could be used for self-harm. After tying a noose with a rope made from toilet paper, Isaiah had been denied toilet paper. “Currently all of his medication has been discontinued,” Dr. Dixon wrote.

When asked how he was feeling about the evaluation, Isaiah said to Dr. Dixon, “It’s nice to have somebody to talk to.” When asked how he’d been feeling for the past three days, Isaiah said, “Bad. I like being alone, but I keep hearing that I should hang myself. They keep laughing at me and telling me I’m no good.” He would not talk about his state of mind at the time of the attacks.

Dr. Dixon did get another description of Isaiah’s childhood. “Sometimes good, sometimes bad,” Isaiah told him. “It was good when my parents weren’t fighting, and when we spent family time together. It was bad when my parents were fighting and the police were called. They were in lots of fights.” In his report, Dr. Dixon wrote, “The defendant denied any history of physical or sexual abuse. When asked about mental or emotional abuse, he stated, ‘I don’t know what that is.’ When it was explained, he replied, ‘Yeah, I got that all the time. I heard that every day. You’re no good. You’re worthless. You’re garbage.’”

Isaiah was then asked what three wishes he would want. It was the same question his younger siblings had been asked seven years earlier
by the Family Court social worker. Isaiah told Dr. Dixon, “Not being in jail,” “perfect health,” and “smart enough to know what the best thing to wish for would be.” Dr. Dixon deemed him “marginally cooperative with the evaluation” and “a seriously disturbed man” who described hearing voices and having visions of maggots crawling through his ears, eyes, and nose. He was “poorly attached to others, with chronic and severe mental illness.” In Dr. Dixon’s opinion, he was not competent to stand
trial.

T
he report from Dr. Dixon was “quite in contrast” to Western State’s report, a prosecutor noted at the next hearing before Judge Hayden. “We would ask for a second opinion.” All parties agreed this was a good idea, and as a result Isaiah was sent back down to Western State with another fifteen-day stay authorized. It was his fourth court-ordered trip to the facility in two years, and he arrived not long after his twenty-fifth birthday. He came back, eight days later, with the same finding as before. “Mr. Kalebu presents with no diagnosable symptoms of a major mental illness, nor any sign of cognitive impairment,” the same doctors who had last evaluated him wrote. This time, however, they added that they thought Isaiah was malingering, meaning faking, a serious mental disorder.

He had told the doctors, on arrival at Western State, that he felt confused and disoriented. Immediately after, he was greeting staff by name again and saying, “I’m back!” He then played cards with other patients with no difficulty. The day before he was to be sent back to jail, at his “competency interview,” Isaiah said over and over that he couldn’t remember the charges against him. When they were explained, he said, “You mean I’m charged with misdemeanor jaywalking, right?” Later, a Western State doctor would testify that Isaiah could have been mocking them with these responses. Still, to demonstrate that it wasn’t a believable response regardless of motivation, the doctors noted in their report that Isaiah “showed no signs of hearing impairment” and that, when asked, he could
recall all kinds of details from his stay at the facility. He also discussed a number of other things. “He has a wide vocabulary,” one doctor who evaluated him said later in court. “He mentioned the amount of time that Nelson Mandela had been in a cell. He quoted Nietzsche. He quoted Oscar Wilde. He was much more well-spoken, and came across as having a much wider fund of knowledge than most defendants we interview, and probably many of the staff.”

In their report on this visit, the Western State doctors wrote, “Mr. Kalebu has the capacity to understand his legal situation and to communicate effectively with counsel in his own defense
when he so chooses
.” They italicized those last four words for emphasis. Whatever was afflicting Isaiah, they believed, it had not taken away his intelligence or his capacity to self-direct.

—

For the first hearing upon his return from Western State, Isaiah refused to come to court. Judge Hayden threatened, again, to sign a “drag order.” For the next hearing, Isaiah was brought down, pursuant to Judge Hayden’s “drag order,” in a restraint chair on wheels. The judge told Isaiah he didn’t want to have to do it again, “but I will.” Isaiah said nothing. There had now been enough conflicting psychiatric opinions that a competency hearing was set, at which almost all the mental health professionals who’d seen Isaiah would appear. It began on December 7, 2010. By that time, Isaiah had been in jail for about sixteen months.

The competency hearing stretched over three court days and ended in January 2011. It didn’t shed a lot of light. Isaiah tried to fire his attorneys at the outset and declared he wanted to represent himself, which could have resulted in his cross-examining the doctors who had once examined him. Judge Hayden didn’t allow it.

On the stand, Dr. William Donald Richie, one of the doctors who evaluated Isaiah at Western State in 2008, said he never got the impression that Isaiah was faking a mental disturbance. Dr. Richie’s co-evaluator,
Dr. Gregory Kramer, agreed, saying that in 2008 Isaiah had been doing “exactly the opposite” of faking a mental disturbance. “He was very adamant that he did not have a mental illness,” Dr. Kramer said. “He resisted all attempts to acknowledge it.” Moreover, it was hard to imagine what motivation Isaiah would have had for fabricating the mania that his mother, his sister, the police, and doctors at Harborview had all observed in the weeks before Dr. Richie and Dr. Kramer evaluated him.

As the long path to this competency hearing demonstrated, Isaiah’s resistance to acknowledging any psychological challenges had only escalated after his 2008 trip to Western State. When Judge Gain required Isaiah to take medication and to see a community mental health worker, Isaiah disobeyed the judge’s orders. In 2009, after Isaiah’s aunt talked about his bipolar disorder in court, and after Judge O’Malley encouraged him to take medication for his “bipolarism,” Isaiah scared his aunt so badly that she filed for a restraining order against him. The next day, Isaiah’s aunt and J. J. Jones, who’d suggested Isaiah be kicked out of the house because of his instability, were dead. When Isaiah then sought out his father, and his father told him he needed to be restrained so he could get help, Isaiah, angry, told him, “You don’t know who will be next.” A few days later, the attacks in South Park.

—

The question at the competency hearing became, how did Isaiah get from adamant, furious denial of any mental disorder to behavior that even the defense’s Dr. Dixon, upon reexamining Isaiah, agreed could be an attempt at faking mental illness? A theory emerged.

Being a smart and controlling man, this theory went, Isaiah might have come to see that being found incompetent could delay, or even prevent, a trial—which of course would be an experience very much out of Isaiah’s control. At the same time, being a person with an enduring perception of himself as not mentally ill, he might have thought something similar to what he’d told a nurse at Western State: “I know I’m not crazy,
but I am willing to do my time here.” He might have thought,
I know I’m not crazy, but I’ll just act crazy, and this will fool the doctors and delay my trial. I’m smart enough to pull it off.

It would have been a grandiose and delusional idea, but Isaiah had been determined by several psychiatric professionals to have issues with grandiosity and delusional thinking. He’d once told Dr. Waiblinger, the jail psychiatrist, that he was smarter than everyone in the jail, including all of its staff. Perhaps he believed the same was true at Western State, where even one of the doctors who’d examined him had admitted Isaiah probably possessed a wider base of knowledge than some of the people who worked at the hospital.

This would explain the strange circumstance in which Isaiah was calmly quoting Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde to his Western State doctors while at the same time trying to show them he was unable to assist his attorneys. The Western State doctors saw that behavior as evidence Isaiah was malingering, pure and simple. In the jail, where Isaiah liked to read
The New Yorker,
officials had called similarly strange behavior “performance art,” and Isaiah himself had actually used the term “performance art” as well, employing it to refer to certain suicide attempts that had no chance of succeeding, attempts that were sometimes accompanied by poetic suicide notes.

Isaiah, apparently, saw it all as a smart strategy, but it is more than a little off to believe one can trick and manipulate psychiatric doctors, or jail officials, this easily. “There’s a combination,” Dr. Dixon, the evaluator chosen by Isaiah’s own lawyers, said on the stand. “I think he has bipolar, and he also can malinger at times. But he’s not malingering the predominant primary bipolar affective disorder.” Dr. Dixon described Isaiah’s faking, when it arose, as being “somewhat of a manipulative quality to try to get what he wants at the time.”

It was a complicated assessment: a manipulative, demented faker inside a disturbed but uncommonly intelligent mind, all of this contained within
a body being held by a system not normally disposed to examining a defendant’s statements for something other than literal content.

Judge Hayden roughly adopted this line of thinking. Though he continued to repeat that he was not a psychiatrist, in the end he had been forced to play one in this case. “The defendant does indeed have a proper diagnosis of bipolar,” Judge Hayden said at the end of the competency hearings, describing Isaiah as an intelligent person who also “feigns symptoms when they are in his interest.” At other times, the judge noted, “he acts appropriately when it’s in his interest.” In other words, Judge Hayden said, “his behavior’s been incentive-motivated rather than motivated by his mental illness.” The conclusion: still competent to stand trial.

—

After this ruling, Isaiah withdrew his request to represent himself. He was back to pretty much where he’d been in 2008: diagnosed as bipolar, awaiting trial, deemed competent, refusing to take medication. One key difference: he was now in jail, and so outbursts connected to any pretrial decompensation could be contained, even if he was not being effectively treated. They arrived quickly.

Four days later, a “status hearing” was held and quickly terminated when Isaiah tipped over a chair at the defense table and started to walk away. Jail officers had to restrain him, and Judge Hayden ordered Isaiah out of the courtroom, declaring he had “voluntarily absented himself.” At the next hearing, less than a month later, Isaiah tried to fire his lawyers again. He complained, again, that things were taking too long. Schwartz tried to explain the situation to the judge. “It seems to be Mr. Kalebu’s complaint that it’s his belief that he’s not competent to stand trial—”

If true, this would be a new belief. Isaiah interrupted his lawyer: “My complaint is that you motherfuckers are wasting my time here and trying to play this fucking game.”

He went on, saying people weren’t doing their jobs right. Judge Hayden tried to interrupt him: “Mr. Kalebu.”

“I’m not done yet. I’m not done talking.”

“No. You are done talking, Mr. Kalebu.”

“You should shut the fuck up and listen if you want to hear me fucking say why I’m firing my goddamn attorneys.”

“He won’t interrupt.”

“You’re interrupting me.”

It went on like this, Isaiah unwilling to relinquish control of the room, unwilling to acknowledge his own role in his current predicament, searching for a procedural upper hand. “How can I work on this fucking case?” he asked. “How do I keep legal materials when you take everything I have? I don’t even get fucking shit. I’m wearing a fucking smock . . . I can’t eat. These motherfuckers poison my food every day . . . I’m not being medicated. And you motherfuckers expect me to have stable fucking good behavior in court when I can’t even maintain? How the fuck is that supposed to be?”

Judge Hayden saw the opening and took it: “Are you asking for medication?”

Isaiah didn’t directly answer. Judge Hayden asked three more times. After the third time, Isaiah said, “I’m asking to be treated for my mental illness.”