Found unfit for trial in botched hit on attorney, hospitalized doctor sues over confinement
Found unfit to stand trial in 2014, concerning his role in a claimed plot to hire a hit man to kill a lawyer who represented his wife in a divorce, a Mississippi physician was committed to a mental facility.
During a court hearing at that time, Dr. Reb McMichael, chief of forensic services at Mississippi State Hospital at Whitfield, called Dr. Arnold Smith delusional, unlikely to improve and perhaps a danger to others if not supervised, the Associated Press reported in 2014.
But, in a lawsuit filed Tuesday against state officials in federal court in Jackson, Smith contends he is being held illegally in an effort to conceal how an alleged would-be hit man was killed in 2012, another Associated Press article reports.
The dead suspect, Keaira Byrd, was slain in a 2012 gunfight with two state attorney general’s agents, at the law office of the alleged target of the would-be hit, attorney Lee Abraham. Authorities said the lawyer happened to be meeting with the agents when Byrd and another suspect burst into the office, prepared to do the deed and a gun battle ensued.
Smith’s suit alleges an AG’s agent killed Byrd “execution-style,” rather than in self-defense, however.
A spokeswoman for AG Jim Hood, who is one of the defendants, called the suit baseless.
Related coverage:
ABAJournal.com: “Did Suspect Physician’s Obsession with Attorney in Claimed Murder Conspiracy Go Beyond Divorce Case?”
ABAJournal.com: “Sued by Lawyer He Is Charged with Conspiring to Murder, Doctor Counterclaims for Emotional Distress”