Capacity to Litigate Determined by Criminal Psychiatric Evaluation

The appellate court dismissed a challenge to a lower court's determination that the defendant lacked the capacity to conduct legal proceedings, which had relied upon a psychiatric evaluation conducted in an ongoing criminal case to assess capacity for the civil suit concerning the division of an estate. The court reasoned that while the expert report in the criminal matter addressed different specific questions, it conclusively demonstrated a severe, long-standing paranoid schizophrenia, which, given the evidential context of the defendant's conduct in various lawsuits, established a very high probability that she lacked the requisite capacity to form a reasonable judgment regarding the essential issues of the estate proceedings as required by civil law.