Artukovic Held Mentally Fit to Aid in Defense

Accused war criminal Andrija Artukovic is mentally competent to help his defense lawyers fight his extradition to Yugoslavia on charges of complicity in mass murder during World War II, a federal magistrate ruled Wednesday.

The decision was made by U.S. Magistrate Volney V. Brown Jr. after hearing testimony from a court-appointed psychiatrist that Artukovic, 85, is currently mentally incompetent.

The psychiatrist suggested a delay in the proceedings while Artukovic undergoes drug therapy in a psychiatric hospital to see if his condition can be improved.

Brown rejected that idea. He said that although Artukovic has days when he is totally disoriented, he has other periods when he is relatively lucid and appears to understand his legal circumstances.

In what federal prosecutors and defense lawyers agreed was an unprecedented ruling in an extradition case, Brown ordered the extradition court proceedings to take place on alternate half-days when Artukovic appears to be in good mental condition.

The magistrate said the daily determination of the “mental status” of Artukovic would be made by Dr. David Hill, a Navy cardiologist and internist at the Long Beach Naval Hospital, where the former Croatian government official is being held without bail.

Gary B. Fleischman, one of Artukovic’s defense lawyers, said he was shocked by Brown’s ruling. He said he had assumed that testimony of Artukovic’s incompetence by Dr. John M. Stalberg, a psychiatrist chosen by Brown to examine Artukovic, would result in the dismissal of the extradition request.

“I thought he had no other choice than to declare him incompetent,” Fleischman said Wednesday. “The family was even talking of whether we could get him out of the hospital today. I was getting ready to ask for his immediate release.”

Fleischman also questioned the selection of Hill to make the daily determinations of the mental condition of Artukovic, noting that the Navy doctor is not a psychiatrist and that Hill himself had testified that he was not qualified to judge Artukovic’s competency.

“I think this is a first in the history of the law on competency,” Fleischman said. “We are considering an appeal of this specific ruling to the district courts, and if we lose the (extradition) case we will definitely be appealing to the 9th Circuit (U.S. Court of Appeals).

“If we didn’t win in this competency hearing after the court’s own doctor found him incompetent, I don’t believe it’s likely we’ll win anything in this court,” Fleischman added.

Assistant U.S. Atty. David Nimmer, who had originally argued that mental competency is not a relevant question for a magistrate to determine in an extradition case, praised Brown’s ruling.

“He unquestionably reached the right decision,” Nimmer said. “I have never heard of an arrangement like this, but it seems an innovative approach to meet the requirements of this case.”

Artukovic is accused of complicity in the murder of 770,000 Serbs, Jews and Gypsies while he was minister of the interior and minister of justice in the Nazi puppet government of Croatia during World War II.

Federal officials say Artukovic entered the United States with a false passport in 1948. His deportation was ordered in 1952, but Artukovic denied the war crime charges. A federal judge in 1959 turned down a request by Yugoslavia for extradition, and the deportation order was stayed.

He was arrested at his Seal Beach home on Nov. 14 on a renewed Yugoslav request for extradition and has been hospitalized in federal custody since then.

Legally blind and suffering from brain atrophy and a heart condition, Artukovic has also been diagnosed as a victim of Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. Court testimony has revealed that he had a slight heart attack when he was arrested, that his face is partly paralyzed because of a series of strokes and that he has an aortic aneurysm.

At times Artukovic has been able to clearly recall events from the World War II era, psychiatrists have testified, but on other days he has been “totally disoriented” and unable even to say what year it is.

Brown ordered Stalberg to examine Artukovic after a Jan. 8 hearing when an initial finding of competency by a different court-appointed psychiatrist, Dr. Saul Faerstein, was challenged by three expert witnesses for the defense.

Stalberg testified that although he judged Artukovic to be incompetent now, he believed that he could be rendered competent with proper psychiatric treatment. He proposed that Artukovic be removed from the Long Beach Naval Hospital and placed in a geriatric-psychiatric hospital where he could be treated with antidepressant drugs to stabilize his mental condition.

The Santa Monica psychiatrist, a member of a federal court panel of forensic psychiatrists, estimated that it would take “several weeks” to bring about an improvement in Artukovic’s mental condition. He said Artukovic suffers both from brain disease that cannot be treated and from depression, which can be ameliorated by drugs.

Brown set a new hearing in the extradition proceeding for Feb. 11, pending the notification from Hill that day on whether Artukovic can appear in court.

There was tight security in the U.S. Courthouse as defenders of Artukovic and members of the Jewish community crowded into the small magistrate’s court to witness the proceeding.

Outside the courthouse, Irv Rubin, head of the Jewish Defense League, engaged in a shoving and shouting match with Petar Radielovic, president of the Croatian Information Service. Rubin denounced Artukovic’s supporters as “Nazi pigs” and hailed Brown’s ruling as appropriate justice for Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

JDL member Earl Krugel was arrested by U.S. marshals on the courthouse steps for investigation of disorderly conduct and failure to vacate federal property, authorities said.