Galveston County DA won’t fight incompetency finding for suspect
The Galveston County district attorney will not object to a court’s finding that the young man charged with capital murder in the Santa Fe High School shooting is incompetent to stand trial.
The accused gunman, 19year-old Dimitrios Pagourtzis, was evaluated independently by three experts, all of whom agreed that he was not fit to stand trial in his current mental state. Nick Poehl, one of the defense attorneys in the case, announced the experts’ findings Monday after a state district judge lifted a gag order.
District Attorney Jack Roady, the lead prosecutor in the case, released his statement one day later, confirming his intention not to object to the experts’ declaration that Pagourtzis was incompetent to stand trial.
“Our focus continues to be getting this case tried to obtain justice for the victims,” Roady said in a statement. “That means the next step is to use every effort to have this defendant restored to competency. The law provides a process to get that done, and we will use every resource available to ensure that it gets done as quickly as possible.”
As of Tuesday, state District Judge John Ellisor had not yet signed off on the experts’ findings to officially declare Pagourtzis incompetent to stand trial, though both Roady and Poehl expect he will this week.
Pagourtzis is charged with capital murder in the shooting spree that killed 10 and wounded 13 in May 2018. Pagourtzis, a junior at the high school at the time, admitted to being the mass shooter after his arrest, according to court documents. He faces life in prison with the possibility of parole after 40 years if convicted.
Pagourtzis will eventually be transferred to a state mental health facility where he will be treated and evaluated over four to six months, delaying his forthcoming Feb. 18 trial in Richmond.
Roady’s statement also drew a distinction between the competency ruling and a possible insanity plea for Pagourtzis, noting that the issue of Pagourtzis’ sanity at the time the offense was committed “can only be resolved at trial.” Evaluations of competency to stand trial speak to a suspect’s state of mind at the time that a trial would begin, while an insanity plea addresses the suspect’s state of mind at the time of a crime.
Poehl previously had not ruled out filing an insanity plea, and Roady in June asked the judge if prosecutors could commission their own mental health evaluation of Pagourtzis in anticipation of a possible insanity plea. The defense did not object, and Ellisor signed the order June 5.
Pagourtzis is being held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day at the Galveston County Jail and had undergone regular psychiatric evaluations by experts paid for by his defense attorneys while in custody. These evaluations were not intended to determine competency to stand trial, however.
The three experts who subsequently evaluated Pagourtzis’ competency were commissioned separately.
Pagourtzis’ attorneys hired Bradley Peterson, a child and adolescent psychiatrist based in Los Angeles, for their examination. The judge tapped Houston psychologist Karen Gollaher as the outside expert, independent of the prosecution and defense. The district attorney’s office selected Victor Scarano, a Houston-based forensic psychiatry expert, to conduct the third and final evaluation of Pagourtzis.
Peterson was the first to conclude Pagourtzis was unfit to stand trial. Gollaher and Scarano drew the same conclusion after subsequent examinations.
Before Pagourtzis’ transfer from the county jail, Ellisor and a federal judge would need to approve any move to a new facility because the suspect is technically in federal custody while he awaits possible federal charges.
Poehl identifed Rusk
State Hospital and North Texas State Hospital in Vernon as the two most likely mental health facilities to hold Pagourtzis because both have maximum-security units.