Judge: Smart's Alleged Abductor Fakes Mental Illness

The man charged in the 2002 kidnap and rape of then-14-year-old Elizabeth Smart has been faking mental illness and is in fact competent to stand trial, a Utah judge ruled today. Nothing “impedes his rational and factual understanding,” Dale Kimball writes of Brian Mitchell, 56. “It is great, it is the beginning of the end,” Smart’s father tells ABC News, “and this time Mitchell is going to have to face the music.” A trial date could be set this month.
(More Elizabeth Smart stories.)