MANY HAVE QUESTIONED DISBARRED LAWYER'S SANITY

By Juan Montoya
Robert Wightman is a recent arrival to Brownsville and the Rio Grande Valley.
Yet, in the short time he has been here he has sought to get into the public spotlight taunting and threatening elected officials, attorneys, political candidates and members of the local judiciary he feels don't measure up to his standards (?). He has threatened many of them on his website with federal indictments, complaints to professional entities, and with incarceration in state and federal prison which will surely result from his complaints.
Before he came here, he was a practicing attorney in Dallas until he was disbarred.
The Texas State Bar hired Dallas family-law attorney Mike McCurley, to prosecute its case. On September 10, 1998, McCurley filed a "motion for a mental examination of Robert Wightman."
"All appropriate measures must be employed to assess Wightman's established pattern of aberrant behavior," McCurley wrote.
"Perhaps the most chilling evidence that Wightman has placed his mental condition into controversy are Wightman's own writings and utterances..."
On Jan. 11, 2002 the 298th District Court of Dallas County disbarred Wightman, then 44.
Another court later found that he was giving political advice without a license and he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor instead of fighting it as a felony that might have cost him up to two years in a state prison.
He was disbarred by the U.S. Supreme Court later in March 2004.
But Wightman's troubled track record starts sometime before that. (That's him with the goofy grin in a Flying Nun outfit that he posted on the worldwide web.)
An article from the Dallas Observer  from March 2000 indicates that while in the U.S. Army, he was "transferred to Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo for surveillance training, he grew ill and was hospitalized for a time with ulcerative colitis. He also became deeply depressed, but couldn't tell anyone why. "I thought I was betraying my government by lying that I wasn't gay," he says. "I couldn't tell them the truth without going to jail."
Although he told the writer that a previous Army mental exam found he had "no psychiatric disorder," his commanding officer at Goodfellow believed Wightman was malingering and ordered that he be evaluated at St. John's Hospital in San Angelo.
"The doctor who performed the evaluation, who Wightman-Cervantes says never examined him, offered this diagnosis in 1982: "It is my initial impression that the patient manifests a paranoid personality disorder." After reviewing his medical records, an Army psychiatrist determined that Wightman suffered from "atypical personality disorder (suspiciousness, self-dramatization, overreaction to minor events, angry outbursts, some grandiose ideation)."
On March 31, 1983, Wightman received an honorable discharge from the Army based on this psychiatric disorder, though he says the doctor attesting to his discharge never examined him either.
Starting in 1986, Wightman tried to change the diagnosis with the Veteran's Administration. He petitioned the military at least three times to reconsider his discharge, but the Army Discharge Review Board turned him down each time.
In 1989, he filed a federal lawsuit against the secretary of the Army, attempting to change the grounds for his discharge again. But the trial judge dismissed the case, and Wightman's appeal to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was equally unsuccessful.
While he was fighting a charge of practicing law without a license after his disbarrment, his court-appointed attorney (he claimed indigence) John Cook petitioned the court to have his client be given a psychiatric examination to determine is competency to stand trial.
Although Wightman sought to disqualify Cook and petitioned for another court-appointed representative (denied), it is instructive to read Cook's petition to the court.
In the motion filed in the 204th Criminal District Court of Dallas County March 18, 2004, Cook told the court that the defendant (Wightman) did not "in the opinion of counsel, have sufficient present ability to consult with counsel to a reasonable degree of rational understanding of the proceedings...
"The facts and circumstances of the alleged offense give rise to the possibility that the defendant was not competent at the time of the alleged commission of said offense.
In order to determine the present mental status of the defendant, a psychiatric examination is requested by the counsel for the defense...In order to permit the undersigned attorney to properly and adequately represent (Wightman), it is necessary that the stated attorney be notified of the date, time and place of any examination, so as to allow such attorney (to) attend said examination...
"Defendant requests that any expert appointed to conduct the necessary examination be directed to reduce all medical-psychiatric findings pertaining to the defendant's competence to stand trial to written form, and to include within such written report the methods, tests or procedures utilized in the examination, any observations and/or findings, recommended treatment, and whether or not there is a substantial probability that the defendant will attain competency to stand trial in the foreseeable future...
"...Defendant herein, by and through counsel pray that the court order the appropriate authorities to conduct a psychiatric examination, in the presence of defense counsel, to determine the competency of the defendant to stand trial..."
On April 5, 2004, Judge Mark Nancarrow, of the 204th District Court of Dallas County signed an order authorizing the psychiatric examination of Wightman by a doctor of the court's choosing (See document above).
Now he's here sitting in judgement and dispensing his legal opinion on those who will listen to him.