SALEM, Ore. – Nearly a decade after he strode into Thurston High School with a rifle and opened fire, Kip Kinkel has asked a judge for a new trial, claiming he was too mentally ill to agree to a plea bargain that sent him to prison for more than 111 years.
Kinkel was just 15 when he killed two of his fellow students at their school in Springfield, wounding 25 others in May 1998. The rampage came a day after he shot and killed his parents at home.
Now 24, newly transferred to state prison from the state juvenile prison this month, Kinkel argues his original defense attorneys and the trial judge should have ordered a mental competency evaluation before going ahead with the plea bargain just before the scheduled start of his trial in September 1999.
Two of the mental health experts involved in the case now say they should have recommended the evaluation, based on their lengthy interviews with Kinkel as a teenager.
Dr. Orin Bolstad, a clinical psychologist, and Dr. William Sack, a psychiatrist, testified Tuesday for Kinkel, arguing that he showed “classic signs” of paranoid schizophrenia, hearing voices and suffering delusions and hallucinations.
Bolstad and Sack say they believe his original attorneys should have raised the insanity defense instead of choosing the plea bargain.
But lawyers for the state attorney general’s office argued that mental illness was not the issue – it was simply whether Kinkel was legally competent to enter into the plea bargain, a decision for his attorneys and a judge.
On Wednesday, the state offered testimony from a forensic psychologist, Dr. Eric Johnson, and a veteran Eugene trial attorney, Kelly Beckley, supporting Kinkel attorneys Richard Mullen and Mark Sabitt, along with the trial judge, Lane County Circuit Judge Jack Mattison.
Johnson, a forensic psychologist, said there was no indication from any mental health expert in the case – including the two defense experts – that Kinkel was incompetent because of his mental illness.
“In my opinion, they have presented a thoughtful and elegant theory, but they have pointed to no discernible evidence that I’m aware of,” Johnson said.
Beckley said Mullen and Sabitt, whom he has known for years, are both experienced criminal attorneys who have dealt with mentally ill clients, while Mattison took “extraordinary” steps to ensure that Kinkel understood all 58 counts of the plea bargain when it was read in court.
Beckley noted the judge said in an affidavit that he would have stopped the proceeding if he had any doubt at all about Kinkel’s competence.
But Sack and Bolstad said Kinkel had become skilled at hiding his illness because he desperately wanted to appear normal and was too young to understand what was happening to him, fearing he would be labeled “retarded” – even though tests have shown him to be highly intelligent.
Susan Howe, a lawyer for the state attorney general’s office, argued that Kinkel understood perfectly what was happening and was more than intelligent enough to calculate that he was going to be found guilty whether he entered a plea or went to trial, and that his best chance for a reduced sentence was the plea deal.
Kinkel’s new attorney, Larry Matasar, argued that any teenager who told doctors he was having paranoid delusions that the government had implanted a computer chip in his brain – as Kinkel did – clearly was suffering from mental illness.
“This young man was seriously ill,” Matasar said, “and it was during this time that his attorneys gave him the plea offer.”
Marion County Circuit Judge Joseph Guimond said he hoped to rule within 30 days on the request for the new trial.
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