Court Rules Charter School Founder “Incompetent to Stand Trial” on Fraud Because of Alzheimer’s/Dementia
In an extraordinarily detailed consideration of expert reports and testimony, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania ruled on November 23, 2015 that a high-profile criminal defendant, Dorothy June Brown, was unable to stand for retrial on fraud charges, following her diagnosis of dementia of an Alzheimer’s type. See United States v. Brown, 2015 WL 748490 (E.D. Pa. 2016).
Ms. Brown, age 78 at the time of the ruling, was accused in 2013 of multiple counts of federal wire fraud, conspiracy to obstruct justice, obstruction of justice and witness tampering, arising from her role in founding and operating two charter schools, with the alleged fraud totaling more than $6 million from federal funding sources. The charges were big news, with coverage often depicting Brown, a “career educator,” as blond and fashionably dressed, and noting that she was married to a prominent attorney.
Two of her four co-defendants negotiated plea deals prior to the first trial. That trial, lasting some 26 days in November-December 2013, resulted in findings of not guilty for two additional defendants, not guilty for Ms. Brown on a portion of the charges, and a hung jury on a substantial number (54 counts) of charges against her. Brown was scheduled for retrial in 2014.
As the second trial date approached, defendant counsel contacted the court with concerns about his client’s competency. A series of evaluations between September 2014 and April 2015 resulted in an initial ruling that Ms. Brown was “competent to stand trial.” However, in June 2015, two weeks before jury selection was to begin, the court ordered additional testing and evaluation.
Ultimately, despite some conflict in the expert testimony on the potential for Ms. Brown to be “exaggerating” some symptoms, such as memory problems, the court concluded Ms. Brown was suffering from a mental disease or defect, and that she was without the ability to assist in her own defense. The court made careful findings, even while noting the Government had joined the defendant’s motion regarding incompetency. The court seemed especially persuaded by the results of “neuropsychological testing,” including evidence that her “ApoE Genotype and amyloid-beta peptide, total tau, and phospho-tau protein levels provide a firm basis”‘ upon which to find that Alzheimer’s disease was the likely cause of her dementia, and thus the court concluded:
“The clinical interviews, the quantitative and qualitative testing data, and the attorney affidavits [detailing her “unintelligible” responses to open ended questions] lead us to conclude that Defendant is suffering from dementia and does not presently have the adequate memory or executive functioning skills to assist her counsel in a meaningful way.”
It seems clear from the thorough discussion of the evidence of dementia, and the court’s detailed findings on the likely impact of the illness on her ability to assist her lawyers, that the court was carefully documenting exactly how and why this defendant would be able to avoid retrial on such high level accusations.