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By Sarah N. Lynch
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The participant in the Jan.6 Capitol riots dubbed “Shaman QAnon” is negotiating a possible plea deal with prosecutors after prison psychologists discovered he suffered from various mental illnesses, said declared his lawyer.
In an interview, defense attorney Albert Watkins said officials from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, or BOP, diagnosed his client Jacob Chansley with transient schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression and anxiety.
The BOP’s findings, which have not yet been released, suggest Chansley’s mental state has deteriorated due to the stress of being held in solitary confinement at a prison in Alexandria, Va., Has Watkins said.
“As he spent more time in isolation… the drop in his sharpness was noticeable, even to the untrained eye,” Watkins said in an interview Thursday.
He said that Chansley’s 2006 mental health records while in the US Navy show a diagnosis similar to that of the BOP.
A spokesperson for the US attorney’s office declined to comment on the case.
Chansley is one of the most recognizable of the hundreds of Donald Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol after the then President in a fiery speech falsely claimed his loss in the November election was the result of fraud.
Chansley, from Arizona, was pictured inside the Capitol wearing a horned headdress, shirtless and heavily tattooed. He is a proponent of the QAnon conspiracy theory which presents Trump as a savior figure and elite Democrats as a cabal of satanist pedophiles and cannibals.
He faces charges of civil unrest and obstruction of formal proceedings.
Watkins has not said what Chansley plans to plead guilty to, but defendants negotiating plea deals typically seek to plead a lesser charge to reduce their potential prison terms.
Watkins said authorities will need to determine how Chansley can access the treatment he needs to “actively participate in his own defense.” Pleading guilty to a charge denies the need for a trial, but defendants must still be declared mentally competent to do so.
Watkins said his client’s BOP assessment did not state Chansley was mentally incompetent and that he did not expect Chansley to be ordered to undergo what is known as restorative treatment skills.
‘MESS CHOCOLATE SOUP’
Watkins said his client had expressed certain illusions, including “believing that he was indeed directly related to Jesus and Buddha.”
“What we did was we took a guy who is unarmed, harmless, peaceful… with preexisting mental vulnerability of importance, and we made him a mess of chocolate soup,” he said. Watkins said.
Federal prosecutors arrested more than 535 people accused of participating in the violence, who saw rioters fight police, smash windows and send members of Congress and then Vice President Mike Pence running for get to safety.
So far, around 20 defendants have pleaded guilty to federal charges in connection with the attack, according to a government tally.
Chansley is in jail pending trial, after prosecutors convinced a federal judge there remained a danger if released.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ordered him in May to undergo a skills assessment.
As of July 5, he was among 188 men and women undergoing an initial mental health assessment to determine if they were qualified to stand trial, according to BOP data.
The BOP in 2017 was blamed by the Inspector General of the Department of Justice for its use of special housing units to confine detainees with mental illness, and the BOP agreed to limit the length of time detainees stay in restrictive housing and ensure that they have significant human resources. contact.
But the COVID-19 pandemic has led the BOP to step up its use of solitary housing units as a means of quarantining inmates to contain the spread of the virus.
A BOP spokeswoman said detainees are sometimes held alone in a cell, but are not cut off from human contact or services.
“Although we need to put people in one cell for a variety of reasons, such as medical isolation, they have access to staff and programs,” she said.
These COVID-19 restrictions, Watkins said, are what led the BOP to place Chansley in isolation.
Seeking a federal inmate skills assessment can be a slippery slope for defense lawyers.
On the one hand, incompetent defendants cannot be prosecuted if they cannot understand the charges or assist in their defense.
However, if a judge declares that there is a preponderance of evidence to show that an accused is unfit to stand trial, then the accused is jailed because federal law requires that inmates undergoing skills restoration treatment be sent to a federal prison hospital.
There are only three federal prison hospitals offering restorative treatment for male inmates, and the average wait time for a bed this year for men has been 84 days, according to BOP data.
(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Scott Malone and Grant McCool)
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