Financier and cricket mogul Allen Stanford is mentally competent to stand trial for an alleged $7 billion fraud, a Texas judge ruled Thursday. Stanford, 61, was found to be temporarily unfit earlier this year after he became addicted to painkillers and antidepressants following a 2009 jailhouse brawl. During the fight just after he was arrested, he was smashed into a steel pole, breaking many facial bones, and thrown onto a concrete floor injuring the back of his head. His defense team sought to have Stanford ruled permanently unfit, arguing that he “suffers from severe loss of long term and short term memory,” as a result of the beating.
But prosecutors said medical staff carried out “a sustained and comprehensive evaluation of Stanford during the past eight months at the end of which they found Stanford competent to stand trial.” The staff at a North Carolina medical facility also found his claim “that 59 years (of his life) were stolen” was “not credible,” prosecutors said in the court filings, maintaining he had remembered significant details in conversations with a psychiatrist. He also underwent a magnetic resonance image scan in March and there “was no evidence of damage to any part of Stanford’s brain that processes memory,” the documents said.
