Accused Planned Parenthood shooter seeks to represent himself

“I do not want them as my lawyers”, Dear said in a court hearing on Wednesday.

A backlog of orders for such evaluations made it unclear when the exam could be completed.

Dear will be sent to the Colorado State Mental Health Institute in Pueblo for the evaluation, but Dear repeatedly vowed not to cooperate with psychologists. “The question is, do I have a constitutional right to be my own attorney, and if I do, your forced psychiatric evaluation – that is not your right”, Dear said. Dear asked the judge, “Do I sound like a zombie?” “Do I sound like I have no intelligence?” But Dear questioned how he could trust his attorney, Daniel King, after King suggested he wasn’t competent to stand trial.

Martinez urged Dear to trust his attorney, but Dear replied, “How can I trust him when he says in the newspaper that I’m ‘incompetent?'”

King, a public defender, was also one of the lawyers for James Holmes, the mass shooter who killed 12 people at an Aurora, Colo., movie theater in 2012. At his prior court appearance this month, Dear called himself “a warrior for the babies” and objected to sealing evidence in his case. 57, announced in court two weeks ago he was guilty of killing three and wounding nine others by gunfire in a November 27 attack at the abortion clinic in Colorado Springs city.

Dear was less disruptive in court on Wednesday, but interrupted proceedings several times.

The evaluation comes over the objections of Robert Lewis Dear, who has insisted he is competent to make decisions about his defense.

Garrett Swasey, 44, a former national figure skating champion, left behind two young children, as did Iraqi war veteran Ke’Arre Stewart, 29, and Hawaii-native Jennifer Markovsky, 35. Nine others were wounded.

The judge ruled that he needs a competency evaluation before he’s allowed to do that. If held at jail, such an evaluation would take an estimated 90 days, he said.

“That’s got to be decided by the judge before we move on to any other proceedings”, May said.

Prosecutors have yet to decide whether to seek the death penalty against Dear for the first deadly assault on a US abortion provider in six years – since the 2009 assassination of a doctor at a Kansas church. Dear has not formally entered a plea.