Kinkel hearing wraps up.

Byline: Matt Cooper The Register-Guard

SALEM - About a dozen experts evaluated Kip Kinkel during a 14-month period leading up to his guilty plea in 1999 - and not one said he wasn't mentally fit to enter a plea, a state's witness said in court Wednesday.

Eugene criminal defense attorney Kelly Beckley's testimony capped two days of arguments in Marion County Circuit Court over whether Kinkel was competent when he pleaded guilty to the shooting deaths of his parents and two Thurston High School students in 1998.

Judge Joseph Guimond will decide within two months whether Kinkel deserves a new trial, but appeals could extend that timeline.

Defense attorney Lawrence Matasar said Kinkel's trial attorneys failed him because they didn't evaluate his competency before advising him to plead guilty. But the state maintains that Kinkel understood the proceedings and worked closely with his attorneys, meeting standards for competency.

Under state standards, a defendant is incompetent if unable to understand the nature of court proceedings, unable to cooperate with his counsel or unable to participate in his own defense, states' attorneys said.

But none of a dozen or so experts who evaluated Kinkel told his trial attorneys that they were worried about his competency, Beckley said. "They never indicated they were concerned that he was not competent to proceed," he added.

Kinkel, 24 and recently transferred to the state prison system from youth corrections, has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He is serving a 112-year sentence for the Thurston shootings.

The hearing hinges on whether Kinkel, although mentally ill, was nevertheless competent when he entered his plea.

Kinkel was taken off medication for two months leading up to his plea so that experts could evaluate him without the drugs' masking effects.

Three days before his plea, Kinkel was found curled up in a ball, hearing voices and suffering from a panic attack, jail records show.

Matasar argued that that was evidence of Kinkel's incompetence at the time of his plea. But Beckley turned the argument around, saying the behavior suggested that Kinkel was well aware of the gravity of the situation.

"Virtually everyone in the criminal justice system facing onerous penalties is anxious," Beckley said. "It seems a given that a competent person would be nervous."

Kristen Kinkel, Kinkel's sister, attended court with family for a second day but declined to comment to a reporter.

Defense witnesses who evaluated Kinkel have said he was adept at hiding his mental illness, perhaps explaining why no competency evaluation was ordered before his plea.

But psychologist Eric Johnson, a state's witness, dismissed those arguments as theories, saying there was no evidence that Kinkel had lost cognitive functions.

Although Kinkel might have been hearing voices in his head during the period leading up to his plea, he could still meet competency standards, Johnson said.