State of Iowa v. Wonetah Einfeldt

APPEL, Justice.

This appeal involves an important intersection involving mental illness and the criminal justice system. In this case, a criminal defendant's lawyer moved midtrial for a competency examination of his client who, due to the stresses of trial was "incapable of aiding [him] in her defense." The record reveals that the client, among other things, testified she suffered from paranoid schizophrenia but had stopped taking prescribed medications due to lack of funds, stated that she wanted to stab her lawyer in the neck and wanted to kill him, declared that she did not know why her…