PORT ORCHARD – Charges filed against a 29-year-old Bremerton man following a violent attack on a couple inside their home last year were dismissed on Thursday as Kitsap County Superior Court Judge Kevin Hull found that the man was not competent to proceed to trial and was unlikely to regain competency over a period of treatment allowed by state law. Hull ordered that the man, James Aaron Adkison, be held for the purposes of a civil commitment evaluation at Western State Hospital.

“This is a dangerous person,” Hull said as he announced his findings at the end of a bench trial on Thursday, referencing the attack Adkison was initially charged for and the man’s courtroom assault on his attorney in October. “There’s no question about that.”

In the March 2022 incident that he was charged for, Adkison was found in the bathroom of a home on Perry Avenue in Bremerton after he entered the residence, assaulted a couple who had been in bed and ran off into the house after a struggle. The man was arrested and has since been held at the Kitsap County Jail and at Western State, where he went through two periods of what is known as competency restoration treatment. A third and final period of treatment was possible, but only if the court found that there was a substantial probability that Adksion would regain competency over a six-month period.

Adkison had been charged with a count of first-degree burglary and a count of first-degree assault, and those charges were dismissed without prejudice, which leaves open the possibility that prosecutors could refile the case at a later date.

In making his ruling, Hull pointed to testimony from an earlier competency jury trial for Adkison this fall, from an attorney who at one point represented the man and raised concerns about his competency and from three medical professionals who assessed him at Western State.

After Adkison was found to be not competent following the two restoration periods, prosecutors sought the jury trial this fall to either continue with criminal proceedings against him or to send him back to the hospital for the third period of restoration, arguing that the man had showed points of clear thought.

Like Hull, jurors in those proceedings were not asked to determine whether Adkison was guilty or not of charges stemming from the 2022 incident but rather whether he was competent to go to trial – an assessment of a person’s ability to understand the charges against them and assist their attorney in their own defense – and whether they found that there was a substantial probability that he could be restored to competency.

At one point during the trial in October, Adkison interrupted proceedings by punching his attorney during the opening statement he was delivering to jurors. The incident didn’t derail the trial, but the proceedings ended in a mistrial after jurors deadlocked on their verdict. Hull subsequently reviewed the case in a bench trial, which concluded with his ruling on Thursday.

This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: Civil commitment possible for Bremerton man after competency ruling