Saying he has no doubt that Dr. Lishan Wang “intends to present a vigorous defense,” Superior Court Judge Roland D. Fasano ruled Monday that Dr. Wang is competent to stand trial and may represent himself on the murder charges he faces in the shooting death of Yale doctor Vanjinder Toor outside his Branford condo last April.
After listening to summations from prosecution and defense for 40 minutes, Judge Fasano, ruling from the bench, said that while there may well be difficulty in communicating with his court-appointed public defenders, Dr. Wang did so by choice and not because he was unable to assist in his own defense.
In finding Dr. Wang competent to stand trial, Judge Fasano accepted the arguments of Senior State Attorney Gene R. Calistro, Jr., and Dr. Mark Cotterell, who oversees all competency cases at the Connecticut Valley Hospital’s forensic division. Dr. Cotterell testified in December and then again last week that Dr. Wang understands the murder charges against him and can assist his attorneys in his defense.
At different times in the ongoing hearing in Superior Court on Church Street, both said a line had to be drawn between the ability or the capacity of a defendant to aid his attorneys and his choice not to. The full hearing has taken several court sessions over the last few months. Testimony was completed last Wednesday.
Judge Fasano noted that Dr. Wang, who grew up in China, is mistrustful of government attorneys, either public defenders or state prosecutors, because each is paid by the state. He does not feel the same way about private attorneys, the judge added. “He has a defense; he’s just not telling his attorneys exactly what it is,” the judge said.
The immediate impact of the judge’s ruling is that Dr. Wang will be transferred from the hospital, where he has spent the last five months, to a correctional institution as yet unnamed. He will then get ready for trial. His first set of decisions, which he may well make with his current public defenders, Scott Jones and Tejas Bhatt, will center on whether to waive a preliminary hearing. He will be back in court to decide this and other issues on March 10.
In reviewing the arguments presented yesterday by Scott, Bhatt and Calistro, Judge Fasano said that having heard the testimony of two experts, Dr. Cotterell and Dr. Peter T. Morgan, who was called by the defense to testify last week, “I could come out on either side.”
But the side he chose is the side that presented a unanimous team report, signed off by top psychiatric hospital officials at Connecticut Valley, who concluded that Dr. Wang understood the charges against him and could assist in his defense. Calistro had observed in his summation Monday that there was no evidence of a thinking or psychotic disorder, as Dr. Morgan asserted, and no indication of “delusions or hallucinations.” He added that Dr. Wang had done well on all four sets of cognitive tests he was given.
“He is able to make decisions crucial to his case,” Calistro told the judge. “He has said he wants someone to look at the ballistic reports from Branford”that were filed after the April 26 shooting, for example. Dr. Wang, who drove to Branford from Marietta, Georgia, where he lived with his wife and three children, is also accused of shooting at Dr. Toor’s then pregnant wife. He missed.
Last September the judge found Dr. Wang not competent to stand trial. Monday he said that after five months of hospitalization, Wang had been restored to competency.
“The defendant is highly educated, has no psychiatric history,” although he has had a few periods of depression, the judge said.
Judge Fasano, who has presided over the case for the last ten months, has had ample opportunity to study the defendant and to listen to his requests, including one last week in which he asked if his hearing was closed to the public, a question that shows he can question procedure, Calistro later said in court. The judge described Dr. Wang as “quiet, not hostile, respectful, rationale. I have no question he understands the proceedings against him far better than many who come before me in the court. I don’t have any doubt.”
Jones and Bhatt, the public defenders, had strenuously disagreed. Before the judge ruled, Jones said in court that Dr. Wang was guarded when first examined by another court psychiatrist, would not permit release of his prior medical records and was obsessed with a civil case filed in Brooklyn following a workplace confrontation with Dr. Toor and other physicians at Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center. That encounter led to his dismissal in 2008.
“He gets stuck on topics and won’t move on to the next one,” Jones said. Jones told the judge that Dr. Cotterell did not explore areas that required probing examination, including his desire to represent himself. Dr. Morgan did, he said.
“There is a consistent theme here,” Jones went on. “He wants to be found competent. He does have information he could share (with us), he just hasn’t.”
Jones’s position is that Dr. Wang has a fundamental distrust of his current attorneys, a topic that was not ever addressed by Dr. Cotterell, he told the judge.
This distrust did not rise to level of being unable to assist his attorneys, the judge found. If Dr. Wang moves forward with his decision to represent himself, as he is expected to do, he will need their assistance. So far he has told them virtually nothing about his life in China, his time in America, the relationship he had with Dr. Toor and other Kingsbrook doctors police say he intended to kill. Branford police arrested him before he got on I‑95 heading toward New York.
Dr. Wang’s attitude toward his attorneys may or may not change. What the judge’s ruling does is to move the Wang trial forward. And this time he calls the shots.
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