© euters/U.S. Marshals Service/HandoutTuscon shooting rampage suspect Jared Lee Loughner is pictured in this undated booking photograph released by the U.S. Marshals Service on February 22, 2011.
Loughner is charged with opening fire at a political event outside a Tucson grocery store on January 8, killing six people and wounding 13 others, including Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot through the head.
U.S. District Judge Larry Burns ordered the hearing in March to determine if Loughner understood the legal proceedings against him and could assist in his own defense. His own legal team has described him as "gravely mentally ill."
The 22-year-old college dropout spent five weeks in Missouri where he underwent mental competency examinations at a federal prison hospital. A report by Dr. Christina Pietz and Dr. Matthew Carroll was lodged with the court.
In a possible sign that he will be found not competent to stand trial, prosecutors and defense attorneys agreed in papers filed last week that their reports were sufficient to reach a conclusion, and that neither Pietz nor Carroll need testify.
"It seems both sides are not going to challenge the findings of the experts," Roy Spece, a professor of law at the University of Arizona, told Reuters.
"Although we don't know, because the records are sealed, they are probably going to say that he is not competent to stand trial," he added.
Loughner faces 49 charges stemming from the rampage at the "Congress on your corner" event, including two counts of first degree murder for the deaths of the chief federal judge in Arizona John Roll, and a Giffords aide.
Paranoid Behavior?
At a previous hearing in March, prosecutors cited widely publicized accounts of Loughner's erratic and paranoid behavior in the months leading up to the shooting spree, which has spurred fresh debate about gun control laws.
Loughner's defense lawyer Judy Clarke said such a proceeding was premature and could interfere with her ability to build trust with her client.
Should the report find Loughner competent, Burns could push ahead with setting a trial date. If they find him incompetent, he could be imprisoned for treatment, deferring any trial until he could be deemed fit.
There have been a few clues about Loughner's mental state since he was wrestled to the ground and arrested outside the grocery story following the shooting.
A detention photograph showed him smiling -- an expression widely criticized in the news media as inappropriate. He has smirked at subsequent appearances in court, and at the March hearing touching on competency, Judge Burns commented on Loughner's "affect."
Emails released last week by Pima Community College, where Loughner was a student in the months before the shooting, chronicled increasingly erratic behavior which led to campus police being alerted on at least five occasions.
In one incident in February last year, the college said, Loughner made comments in class that were "completely out of context, talking about abortion, wars, killing people, and 'strapping bombs to babies.'"
Subsequent emails noted Loughner's "jittery" eyes, "scattered" speech, and "intimidating," "disruptive" and "bizarre" behavior, and said classmates had called him "dark" and "creepy."
In late September, college authorities noted a rambling YouTube video posted by Loughner in which he called the college a "genocide school," and talked about "mind control" and "students who have been tortured." He was suspended the same day.
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