Robert Brockman—the software billionaire charged in the largest tax evasion case in American history, who has since claimed to have a form of dementia—will be evaluated by a team of three doctors, including Park Dietz, the most famous forensic psychiatrist in the country.
Dietz has testified in a range of high-profile criminal cases, including those against serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, the Unabomber, the Beltway snipers, and mass murderer Jared Lee Loughner. In addition to holding a position at the UCLA School of Medicine, Dietz runs two companies focused on workplace violence prevention and forensic analysis of criminal behavior respectively. He has also consulted for Law & Order and Law & Order: Criminal Intent.
In an order filed on Monday afternoon, the U.S. District Court in Houston announced that Dietz would join two other doctors—psychologist Robert Denney and neurologist Ryan Darby—to evaluate Brockman’s mental agility in a court-ordered recorded interview.
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The Houston-based executive was charged in October for an alleged scheme to hide some $2 billion in income from the Internal Revenue Service over two decades—the most anyone has ever been accused of hiding from U.S. tax authorities. He has pleaded not guilty.
The 39-count indictment details a cinematic plot involving shredded documents, a slew of code names like “Permit” and “the House” for his associates and enemies, a network of offshore entities, and a prominent billionaire accomplice who secured a rare non-prosecution agreement to cooperate with investigators in their case against Brockman.
Though the 79-year-old was charged in San Francisco, Brockman successfully moved to transfer the trial to Houston, his place of residence, after his lawyers claimed the billionaire suffered from a form of dementia.
In a court filing, the lawyers claimed Brockman suffers from “Parkinson’s disease, Parkinsonism, Lewy body dementia, or ‘some combination’ of all three,” The latter disorder is a fairly common cognitive disease, particularly in men over 60, that arises when brain nerve cells are damaged by protein deposits.
The evaluation will take place on Sept. 13 in Houston.
