Judge Orders Drugs for Capitol Murder Suspect

The mentally disturbed man accused of shooting two Capitol Police officers will continue to be forced to take anti-psychotic medication in an effort to make him competent to stand trial, a federal judge ruled Friday.

In a U.S. District Court hearing, Judge Emmet Sullivan ruled that Russell Weston had shown such improvement after six months of the medication that he might eventually understand the double murder charges against him.

“The court is persuaded by clear and convincing evidence that the defendant’s mental state is improving,” Sullivan said, citing a psychiatrist’s testimony on Thursday as the basis for his ruling. “There is a substantial probability that he might be ready to stand trial in the foreseeable future.”

Sullivan then granted the prosecution’s request that the medication be extended for 120 days, when he will again review Weston’s mental state. Weston’s psychiatrist, Sally Johnson, testified Thursday that it might take 18 more months for Weston to become fully competent.

Weston’s attorneys, the District of Columbia’s federal public defender A.J. Kramer and assistant public defender Gregory Poe, declined comment after the ruling.

Weston is charged with the July 24, 1998, slaying of Capitol Police officers John Gibson and Jacob Chestnut in a shootout in the Capitol building. Weston, 45, who had been living in Montana and had a long history of mental problems, is charged with bursting into the building with a revolver, claiming he needed to retrieve a hidden satellite system that could reverse time.

He was shot through the arm in a gun battle and taken into custody.

In the ensuing four years, his case has become a precedent-setting test of the government’s right to order mentally disturbed criminal defendants to take mind-altering medication.

Weston’s attorneys have argued that it is not ethical to force him to take medication that might result in his standing trial and facing the death penalty. Without the medicine, psychiatrists have testified that there is little or no chance Weston would ever be deemed competent. Prosecutors have argued that this can be remedied by ordering Weston to take antipsychotic drugs.

Sullivan ordered him to begin taking the medication in January. Johnson, the psychiatrist at the federal prison in Butner, N.C., where Weston is being held, has testified that Weston does not object to taking the medication when it is offered to him.

But, she noted, Weston still has no real sense of the case against him, suffers from paranoid delusions and thinks that the judge, along with most attorneys in the case, are actually escaped prison inmates who will shortly be arrested.