BROOKLYN, N.Y. (CN) — During his third session with an accused al-Qaida operative, the forensic psychiatrist watched in amazement as the bombastic, masturbating and defecating man from past observations morphed into a calm and polite patient.
“In candor, I was so dumbfounded, gobsmacked, by the transformation that I was witnessing that I didn’t think to administer the psychiatric test,” psychiatrist Mark Mills testified at a dramatic three-hour hearing on Tuesday.
Mills took the witness stand in Brooklyn Federal Court to defend his view that Ibrahim Suleiman Adnan Adam Harun is mentally competent to stand trial later this month on charges related to attacks that killed two U.S. service members in Afghanistan in 2002.
Prosecutors also say Harun conspired a year later in a plot to bomb U.S. diplomatic targets in Nigeria.
If the case goes to trial on Feb. 27, Harun will likely continue his ongoing boycott of courtroom proceedings.
Earlier Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan ruled that he would not put U.S. marshals at risk by forcing Harun to appear in court against his wishes, as prosecutors had requested.
“I think the government is being very faithful to usual customs in very unusual circumstances,” Cogan said.
From his first court appearance on May 3, 2013, Harun made clear that he would not cooperate with his prosecution and incarceration. Harun threatened to kill the attorneys prosecuting his case as well as courthouse personnel. “I am a warrior,” Harun had declared at the hearing, according to a government memorandum. “And the war is not over.”
Since that time, Harun has tried to tear off his prison uniform while shackled, and he has lashed out at anyone connected to the case — including his own lawyers. Harun’s lead attorney David Stern, a partner at Rothman, Schneider, Soloway & Stern, recommended sending Harun a letter advising him of his constitutional rights at trial, but he doubted his client would read it.
“He might read it,” Stern told the court. “He might tear it up. He might eat it.”
While prosecutors claim that Harun is attacking the court’s legitimacy, defense attorneys argue that their client’s erratic behavior reflects the longtime unraveling of his mind following years of torture and ongoing solitary confinement.
Born in Niger and raised in Saudi Arabia, Harun fell into the Libyan custody in 2005, and he claims to have been tortured during roughly six years of confinement.
Released as Muammar Gaddafi’s government collapsed six years later, Harun was arrested for assaulting officers aboard a refugee ship with him to Italy.
In the year before Harun’s extradition, two Italian mental health experts were divided over whether he was “psychotic” or “normal,” and treated him with psychotropic medication, his lawyer said.
Mental health experts continued to argue the same controversy on Tuesday, as the witnesses for the defense and prosecution were called to the witness stand to defend conflicting medical reports, all of which are locked under a courtroom seal.
Mills, the government psychiatrist, confirmed Metropolitan Detention Center records about body armor Harun made out of milk cartons, his habit of talking to a mirror and the walls, and that he once danced naked out of a shower.