Illness faked to avoid US trial
The Las Vegas man accused of stealing underpants and g-strings from Australia’s Thunder From Down Under strippers and then firing a Dirty Harry-style Magnum revolver at them was faking mental illness, a court has been told.
Joey Kadmiri, 25, was declared competent by two doctors to stand trial.
“One said he’s pretending to be incompetent,” Clark County District Court Judge Linda Marie Bell said during a hearing on Friday.
Kadmiri, who has been in custody since the March 18 incident at the Excalibur Casino on the Vegas strip, refused to leave his cell for the hearing.
Last month during a court appearance Kadmiri called the two prosecutors Beavis and Butthead, accused his former lawyer of working to convict him and told the court, “I’m really paranoid”.
Kadmiri’s first trial ended in mistrial in July when a juror, after two days of testimony, said he saw a story about the trial on TV and that he and the other jurors had discussed the case despite the judge repeatedly warning them not to.
Bell set a new competency hearing for October 17 to give Kadmiri’s lawyers time to review court-ordered psychological evaluations on Kadmiri from 2010, 2011 and earlier this year.
Each evaluation found Kadmiri competent.
Kadmiri was arrested after Australian and New Zealand strippers from the Down Under troupe confronted Kadmiri backstage during a show after he allegedly stole props, a pair of teal underpants and a g-string.
He faces robbery with a weapon, burglary and battery charges.