James Richard Odle v. Jeanne Woodford, Acting Warden, of California State Prison at San Quentin

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• explaining that “[a] defendant may not be criminally prosecuted while he is incompetent, and the state must give him access to procedures for determining his competency”
• finding that competency hearing should have been held where clinical evidence raised a doubt as to defendant’s competency and defendant had an extensive history of mental impairment
• observing that counsel are not trained mental health professionals
• “We have said that retrospective competency hearings may be held when the record contains sufficient information upon which to base a reasonable psychiatric judgment.”
• \The state court can nonetheless cure its failure to hold a competency hearing at the time of trial by conducting one retroactively.\
• defendant suffered from hallucinations, was committed to a psychiatric ward at least four times, and had a temporal lobectomy removing a 3x3x4 inch piece of his brain

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).