Incompetence

Alexander Kinyua, the college student accused of killing a family friend and ingesting his heart and brain, has been declared incompetent to stand trial, according to court records. Harford County State's Attorney Joseph I. Cassilly said in an Aug. 13 letter that prosecutors had reviewed a report from Clifton T. Perkins Hospital, the state's maximum-security psychiatric hospital, and agreed to the designation without a court hearing on the matter. Kinyua, 21, has pleaded not criminally responsible on charges of first-degree murder and use of a dangerous weapon in connection with the May killing of Kujoe Bonsafo Agyei-Kodie, a Ghanaian national who had been staying with his family in their Joppatowne home.

A West Baltimore man captured on video attacking a police officer on New Year's Eve was convicted of second-degree assault last month in a rare bit of swift justice in the city. Manuel Imel, 40, was sentenced to 10 years in prison, with all but one year of the term suspended, for tackling an officer who was in the middle of arresting a second man. A recording of the incident was widely viewed online at WorldStarHipHop.com. It shows two officers trying to handcuff a man in the street as a crowd watches, apparently upset.

Despite an unusual public repudiation by the CIA, Daniel Shykind clings to the belief that he is a secret agent, making him mentally incompetent to stand trial on fraud charges, a Montgomery County Circuit judge ruled yesterday.Judge S. Michael Pincus agreed with defense experts who said Shykind will not help his lawyers because he thinks it entails giving away government secrets."His factual understandings are distorted," Pincus said. "In other words, he can't tell his counsel the truth."

TORONTO -- Three years after Canadian peacekeepers tortured and killed a Somali teen-ager, an investigation into one of the most jarring episodes in recent Canadian history is spurring charges of cover-up, conspiracy, interference and incompetence high in the military command.The peacekeepers were from the elite Canadian Airborne Regiment assigned to Somalia for six months in December 1992 as part of the U.N. famine relief mission.On March 16, 1993, Shidane Abukar Arone, 16, was caught sneaking into the regimental compound at Belet Huen and was beaten to death.

A Baltimore lawyer who was a former assistant federal prosecutor and one-time deputy director of the Legal Aid Bureau had his law license suspended yesterday by the Court of Appeals. Michael G. Middleton, in private practice since 1988, received a suspension of at least three years. In a 16-page opinion, the state's top judges said he was incompetent in representing several criminal defendants and he had been found in criminal contempt last November for lying to a Baltimore County judge to win a delay for a trial.

Bernard L. Ward Jr. has spent the past two years in prison, serving a life sentence for a murder he insists he did not commit and for a guilty plea he says he was cornered into making.The 31-year-old Pasadena man went to court yesterday to seek a new trial. His current lawyer blamed Ward's decision to plead guilty to murder -- after all the evidence had been heard but before the case had gone to the jury -- on the advice of a lying, corrupt, incompetent defense attorney whohad been outwitted during the abbreviated trial.

A Pasadena man who has spent the past three years in prison after pleading guilty to a murder he insists he did not commit has been granted a new trial.Anne Arundel County Circuit Judge Robert H. Heller Jr. overturned Bernard L. Ward Jr.'s 1989 first-degree murder conviction and the life sentence that followed.Mr. Ward had blamed his decision to plead guilty to murder -- after all the evidence had been heard at trial but before the case had gone to the jury -- on the advice of what he called a lying, corrupt and incompetent defense attorney who had been outwitted during the abbreviated trial.

A Howard Circuit Court judge found a 47-year-old Catonsville man not criminally responsible yesterday for shooting and seriously wounding a school custodian in an Ellicott City drugstore, and committed him indefinitely to a state mental institution. James M. Lane faced attempted first-degree murder and other charges in the shooting Aug. 2 of Robert Lee Jackson Jr., who is chief custodian at Mayfield Woods Middle School in Elkridge. "Psychiatrists will determine when -- if ever -- [Lane]

Here's the problem: If you stop 100 people at random and ask them to evaluate their driving ability, every single one will say "above average." It is a scientific fact that all drivers, including those who are going the wrong way on interstate highways, believe they are above average.Obviously, this is impossible: Some drivers have to be below average. Not me, of course. I am currently ranked fourth among the top drivers in world history, between Mario Andretti and Spartacus.But there are many incompetent people out there on the roads, changing speed and direction without warning, or drifting along in the left, or "passing," lane at 23 mph, blinking their turn signals, which they never turn off, even in the garage.

A teenage boy charged as an adult with murder in the shooting death of a man in an apparent drug deal and robbery plot is not competent to stand trial because he is mentally retarded, his lawyer said yesterday. Defense attorney Carroll McCabe entered a not-guilty plea on behalf of her client, Ross Ethan Womick, 16, and filed a motion asserting that he is not competent yesterday in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court. "There's been testing, and, based on that testing, he's not competent due to mental retardation," McCabe said after the hearing, declining to elaborate.