(January 10) -- The government psychiatrist who found John Hinckley and Jim Bakker competent to stand trial will come to Sacramento to see if Theodore Kaczynski is able to present his own defense or even stand trial at all.

Dr. Sally Johnson, who works at the the federal correctional facility in Butner, NC, will examine Kaczynski at the Sacramento County jail where he is currently being held.

In bringing Dr. Johnson into the case, U.S. District Judge Garland Burrell made clear that he expects Kaczynski to work with her.

"If he's not going to cooperate, he will be on a plane, and I will fly him to a psychiatric institution immediately," said Burrell. The testing would then occur there.

Kaczynski listened as his lawyers asked the judge to let him represent himself at trial

Burrell said Johnson would begin the tests as soon as Monday, and would be finished by next Friday. A competency hearing involving her testimony is set for January 22.

If Kaczynski is found competent at that point, the jury will be brought in and the trial will resume. However, if she needs it, Johnson will have up to thirty days to report on Kaczynski's status.

Burrell also brought up in court the reports of Kaczynski's attempted suicide, which he said U.S. Marshals informed him of on Thursday afternoon. "Those allegations are significant to a determination of the competency issue," Burrell said, connecting the matter to the impending tests of Kaczynski's ability to stand trial. "If you have that type of an allegation, combined with the other matters that took place in my courtroom yesterday, I believe firmly that the judge is mandated to do exactly what I did."

Kaczynski made an urgent plea through his lawyers on Thursday to be allowed to defend himself in his trial. He and his attorneys have long been sparring over the issue of the mental defect defense they want to present on his behalf.

"This is a very difficult position for him," defense lawyer Judy Clarke said Thursday. "He believes that he has no choice but to go forward as his own lawyer."

Kaczynski's situation became more tenuous after reports Thursday that U.S. Marshals and local officials believed he tried to hang himself with his underwear on Wednesday night, before coming into court Thursday to plead for another option in his defense.

In response, officials placed Kaczynski under constant video monitoring and have forced him to wear a heart monitor at all times, a uncomfortable situation for the infamous technophobe.

The competency testing ordered Friday will attempt to establish a number of issues crucial to deciding if the trial can move forward.

Some competency standards are relatively easy to meet: a defendant must be able to understand the nature of the proceedings and must be able to assist lawyers in preparing a defense.

But defendants also need to be able to make rational decisions about defense strategy, said Richard Bonnie, director of the Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy at the University of Virginia, and that last standard will be difficult to prove in Kaczynski's case, especially because of Kaczynski's reticence when it comes to psychiatrists.

"In order to do a decent job of assessment, they need to be able to explore what he thinks about things and how he feels about certain things," said Bonnie. "Given Kaczynski's general guardedness, we don't know how cooperative he is going to be."

Judge Burrell will also need to consider what strategies Kaczynski might use in defending himself in order to insure the trial does not devolve into a chaotic travesty, as happened in the 1995 trial of Colin Ferguson, who unsuccessfully defended himself after shooting six people and injuring 19 on the Long Island Railroad.

"You really do not want the trial to become a farce," said Bonnie. "That should legitimately be on the judge's mind."

The current trial will cover incidents in 1985 and 1995, as well as two bombings in 1993. A separate trial will cover charges against Kaczynski for a 1994 bombing in New Jersey.

Federal authorities believe that Kaczynski, 55, is the Unabomber, responsible for sixteen mail and package bombs that killed three people and injured 23 during between 1978 and 1995 in attacks across the country. He was arrested on April 3, 1996 in his Montana cabin, where he had lived for most of the past 26 years.

During the early stages of the case, federal authorities coined the name "Unabomber" because universities and airlines were early targets.