Aliyya Swaby Photo
Wang and Ullmann in court Monday.
The murder case of Dr. Lishan Wang is headed to the State Supreme Court for the second time in its nearly six-year history and before the case has gone to trial.
Chief Public Defender Thomas Ullmann has formally filed an appeal on behalf of Dr. Wang, 49, seeking to overturn a decision that he be forcibly medicated. The appeal will delay any forced medication that the state hoped would help restore Dr. Wang to mental competency so that he can stand trial for the murder of Dr. Vajinder Toor.
Dr. Wang is charged with shooting Dr. Toor to death outside his Branford condo on April 26, 2010. Dr. Toor was Dr. Wang’s former supervisor at the Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center in New York. At the time he was shot to death, Dr. Toor was 34, a father and a post-doctoral fellow at Yale. His then-pregnant wife witnessed the shooting. She was shot at too, but not hit. Dr. Wang has alleged Dr. Toor and other Kingsbrook doctors and officials caused his firing in 2008 that ended his medical career.
In court Monday Superior Court Judge Thomas V. O’Keefe, Jr. outlined recent court history, saying “we had a previous hearing on whether the defendant should be forcibly medicated, if necessary so that he can be returned to competency.” The court, he said, then issued an order to forcibly medicate Dr. Wang with anti-psychotic drugs and subsequently granted a stay of that order for 20 days when Ullmann said he intended to appeal.
The Tolling Issue
What was before the court today, and it was the only issue, was whether to count the time it takes for this appeal to be completed, a time that could range from six months to a year or more, against an 18-month civil deadline to restore a defendant to competency in this state.
Aliyya Swaby Photo
Eugene R. Calistro, Jr., the senior assistant state’s attorney in charge of the state’s case (pictured), said in court that “this time should not count against the statutory time period of 18 months required under civil law. It has been decided by our Supreme Court.”
Taking into account Dr. Wang’s first competency hospitalization in 2010 and 2011 and his second most recent one, he has spent 366 days or more than one year in a state of incompetency.
So the calendar is moving and state officials have taken notice.
Calistro asked Judge O’Keefe not to toll the time “from today forward to a date uncertain given the appeal.” He said the state will request an expedited appeal “so we can get this moving in less than a year, maybe less than six months.”
Ullmann agreed with Calistro. “I am not going to oppose this,” he said. He said the defense has sought the appeal in the first place and “it would be frivolous for me” to not toll the time it takes to hear the appeal.
Judge O’Keefe agreed. He said “this time will not count against the tolling.” He also said before the ten-minute court session ended that he intends to file a written memorandum of his decision.
The appeal will be handled by the chief of the appeals bureau for both the state and the public defender’s offices, the attorneys told the Eagle afterwards.
Today’s hearing will be the last pre-trial hearing in Judge O’Rourke’s courtroom for a while although a status date has been set for Feb.1. Dr. Wang appeared in court today wearing a dark jacket and work-out clothes. He is currently housed at Whiting Institute at Connecticut Valley Hospital, where he will reside during the course of the appeal. He has refused medication; he will not be medicated during the course of this appeal.
Prior Supreme Court Case
The last state Supreme Court decision in the Wang case came in June 2014 when, in a unanimous decision, the state’s highest court ruled that an indigent defendant who chooses to represent himself has a constitutional right to public funding for expert witnesses at trial and that the public defender’s office must provide the funding once “standby counsel” has been appointed. Click here to read the story. The high court took nearly one year to decide the case.
The state Supreme Court’s decision came at a time when Dr. Wang was representing himself and sought fees for his expert witnesses. While Dr. Wang had a stand-by public defender assigned by the court, the public defender’s office had refused to pay his costs for trial because Dr. Wang rejected their representation.
At issue in the earlier case before the Supreme Court was a primary question: Which arm of state government should pay expert witness fees for Dr. Wang and for other defendants in the state’s court system who elect to represent themselves?
The Supreme Court ruled that the public defender’s office will be required to pay for Dr. Wang’s expert witnesses and investigator costs as long as the requests are “reasonably necessary” to present a criminal defense.
What was the reality in 2014 is no longer. Dr. Wang is no longer representing himself because the judge deemed him not competent to stand trial and to represent himself. The public defender’s office now represents him, a development he is not happy with. Dr. Wang is still filing motions as if he is representing himself.
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