Carrion v. State
| Decision Date | 21 November 2003 |
| Docket Number | No. 5D03-3410.,5D03-3410. |
| Citation | 859 So.2d 563 |
| Parties | Michael CARRION, Petitioner, v. STATE of Florida, Respondent. |
| Court | Florida District Court of Appeals |
Robert Wesley, Public Defender, and Steven S. Graves, Assistant Public Defender, Orlando, for Petitioner.
Charles J. Crist, Jr., Attorney General, Tallahassee, and Rebecca Roark Wall, Assistant Attorney General, Daytona Beach, for Respondent.
Michael Carrion seeks a writ of prohibition to prevent the trial court from proceeding with his criminal trial before he has had a mental health evaluation. In view of the due process implications raised by the facts, we elect to treat the petition as one seeking certiorari, and grant the writ.
Mr. Carrion was charged with a life felony, and the public defender's office was appointed to represent him. Subsequently, the trial court entered an order recognizing that reasonable grounds had been presented to question Mr. Carrion's competency to proceed with a trial. In the order the court appointed two mental health experts to examine Mr. Carrion to address the issue of competency, as well as the issue of sanity at the time of the alleged offense. There are a number of theories put forth regarding why Mr. Carrion was never examined, including that the mental health experts never received a copy of the order appointing them. In any event, the examination has never been performed.
In early September the case was assigned to a different attorney in the Public Defender's Office. Shortly thereafter the State filed an amended witness list, and the case was set for a pre-trial conference. At the pre-trial conference Mr. Carrion's newly appointed counsel moved for a continuance because discovery was not completed. The trial court denied the motion and set the case for trial. While preparing for trial, defense counsel learned that the mental health evaluations were never conducted. He immediately presented a written motion for continuance based on the lack of mental health evaluations. At the hearing on this motion the trial court again denied the continuance, apparently because Mr. Carrion had now returned to school. The court concluded that if Mr. Carrion could "function in the community at that level, he should be here for trial." We granted a stay pending our review of this case.
Rule 3.210(a) of the Florida Rules of Criminal Procedure, reads, in part, as follows:
A person accused of an offense ... who is mentally incompetent to proceed at any material stage of a criminal proceeding shall not be proceeded against while incompetent.
A trial, of course, is defined in subparagraph (a)(1) of the rule as a "material stage." The rule then prescribes the methodology for determining competency to proceed, saying in subparagraph (b) that if at any material stage of a criminal proceeding a court has reasonable grounds to believe that the defendant is not mentally competent to proceed, "the court shall immediately enter its order setting a time for a hearing to determine the defendant's mental condition," and appoint the appropriate experts to examine the defendant. There does not appear to be any discretion on the part of the trial court once it makes the determination that there are reasonable grounds to believe the defendant is not mentally competent. If the trial judge has reasonable grounds to believe that a criminal defendant is not competent to proceed, then the court must conduct a competency hearing. See Kelly v. State, 797 So.2d 1278, 1280 (Fla. 4th DCA 2001)
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