Wright mentally cleared to stand trial; next hearing set for Jan. 2014

Jeremiah Wright has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity in the 2011 slaying of his special-needs son, a plea entered after District Judge John LeBlanc declared him competent to stand trial.

Wright is accused of beheading and dismembering 7-year-old Jori Lirette, a wheelchair-user diagnosed with cerebral palsy, at their Thibodaux home in August 2011. For more than two years prosecutors have attempted to arraign the suspect on the crime he confessed to, but LeBlanc twice ruled Wright did not have the mental capacity to defend himself rationally against the first-degree murder charge.

LeBlanc judged Wright’s competency to proceed based on his current mental health. The ruling has no bearing on Wright’s sanity at the time of the crime, likely to be contested during the trial. Wright’s defense team holds the burden to prove he was insane at the time of Jori’s death. A status hearing is scheduled in January 2014.

District Attorney Cam Morvant II has said the 17th Judicial District would pursue the death penalty.

Louisiana law holds that suspects in capital cases who are acquitted on the grounds of insanity are to be remanded to a state mental institution or to a private institution approved by the court.

Other felonious suspects acquitted by reasons of insanity have the possibility for early release if they can prove they do not pose a danger to society.

Upon a so-called insanity plea, law gives the court authority to appoint a sanity commission to examine the defendant’s mental condition at the time of the crime. LeBlanc appointed a sanity commission after Wright’s indictment in 2011 but later limited the scope of the commission to only consider Wright’s competency to proceed to trial.

The commission’s findings that he was not mentally fit to stand trial launched the two-year process of “rehabilitating” his mental state, which concluded last month.

Primarily, the issue was whether Wright understood the nature of the charges against him and whether he could assist his defense attorneys.

LeBlanc ruled in February that Wright, should he stand trial, would be unable to maintain a consistent defense, listen to witnesses to gauge their truthfulness, make simple decisions as presented by his counsel and testify in his own defense. Those are four elements of the Louisiana Supreme Court-derived criteria used to determine a suspect’s mental capacity to stand trial.

Doctors retained by the Capital Defense Project of Southeast Louisiana opined that Wright deluded himself into believing he was part of a government-sponsored social experiment as to whether he would kill his son, whom he repeatedly referred to as an inanimate object.

State doctors who treated Wright at the Eastern Louisiana Mental Health System in Jackson, La., claimed the suspect was exaggerating his symptoms in order to remain under the care of doctors and avoid facing the charge.