Hi, there! I was wondering if you would feel comfortable speaking about what you see in your line of work in terms of the intersection between mental health, crime, and the court system? Have you ever defended someone who was determined initially incapable of standing trial due to mental illness? Do you have any thoughts on ways that the system could improve in handling alleged offenders who are mentally ill? Or what can be done in cases where the offender in question is truly in need of help and they’ve also, actually committed crimes and are a danger to themselves and others?
In disclosure, I am thinking of a terrible situation I am aware of (but trying not to doxx myself with specifics), in which a mentally ill man made threats against a neighboring family, made sexual gestures toward their child, burned down part of their property, burned down his own house, was in and out of jail on multiple smaller charges, had restraining orders against him that he ignored, etc. After a years long situation extremely well documented, and with the cops called many times only to say they couldn’t do anything, the guy murdered one of the family members (the murder was recorded on the victim’s cell phone).
Suspect got put in a secure mental facility and was put on medication to get him stable enough to go to court. He ended up getting life without parole (in a death penalty state). The family was just…shattered. Severely traumatized from the years of harassment, the murder, AND the lack of any real action by the system to prevent this, even though they had “done everything right” as expected by the law, so to speak.
I firmly agree with your posted thoughts on human rights, and I know it’s far more likely for people who are mentally ill to be victims than perpetrators. But sometimes…it’s possible that it does happen. And I just feel so sad, for the family who lost so much. And sad that it took forcibly incarcerating this man and medicating him before he could even be declared competent, to even be aware enough of what he did, that he understood his actions and their consequences sufficiently to be given due process.
It’s hard not to wonder - if they’d done that in the first place, if he would still have committed this murder. He must have been so very sick and yet, even in and out of jail, there just wasn’t anything in place that would have prevented this. Or if there was, it didn’t work as it should have. He’s lost any chance at a life of his own, and has to live in prison with what he did while he was very unwell.
I’m sorry, I know this is a very fraught topic, and I understand if you prefer not to answer this. I may unintentionally be coming across as in favor of involuntarily commitments, but I am very sensitive to the matter of involuntarily hospitalizing and medicating people suffering from mental illness. It is a system historically and contemporarily riddled with horrific abuse of marginalized people. It’s not necessarily a viable solution to anything, especially not in its current state.
The intersection of issues at play here feels like the devil’s own crossroads where nobody wins and everything goes straight to hell. But I have to hope that this CAN change. And I’d really like to hear some things you think could help improve it?
I really appreciate this ask and its thoughtfulness. This *is* a really complex and tangled issue and the complete awful tragedies that result, like what happened to that family, are! preventable! It makes me furious that they weren't!
I'll back up a little and answer this a bit at a time.
1: Do I have clients who have been declared incompetent?
My GOD, yes. I have a half-dozen right now who are in the middle of the competency restoration process. (It's called "restoration" even if that person has never been competent in the first place.) Competency can be based on lack of knowledge/understanding about the court system (often because of developmental disability, or in the case of representing juveniles, because of (checks notes) being an actual child) or it can be based on a lack of rational understanding of what's going on. That's when you get into the delusions and psychosis and such.
2: Have I had clients who were not guilty by reason of insanity?
Yes, actually. It's a tough thing to get to, but some of my clients have been so delusional that they truly did not comprehend the nature and character of their actions/the rightness and wrongness. It's very much not a get-out-of-jail-free card; if an NGRI (not-guilty-reason-insanity) happens on a misdemeanor, the person would likely spend far far more time in a state hospital than they would in jail.
3: What should have happened here?
This is the question you're struggling to answer because you don't know the systems involved.
The saddest revelation, as always, is that the system does not protect people. Cops are not there to prevent crime. They are there to arrest people in the aftermath. So you can scream and scream all you want, but if the person hasn't done something a cop thinks makes for an easy arrest, often they will do nothing at all. Even when harm is preventable.
This is why you get court cases that say that even though cops are there to "serve and protect" they actually have no obligation to do either.
The other thing you have to understand is that our mental health system was dismantled in the 80s and never recovered. My state has three state psychiatric hospitals for adults and one state psychiatric hospital for children. My state isn't in the top 10 most populated states but it's pretty close; put it at somewhere from 5-10 million people.
One hospital for children. Out of millions of people.
Even those hospitals have huge wings that are shut down. Some of the adult hospitals have literal huge abandoned buildings just on their grounds, rotting. They are always understaffed, even for the number of beds they have available.
So, a huge amount of mental health care and monitoring is outsourced to local services. (Run on the level of counties and cities, but funded through the state.) Those are open access for all residents of their county.
Yeah, they'll monitor if someone released from a hospital comes in to their appointments. They'll try calling a few times to see if they answer their phone. If the person was lucky enough to get into some kind of supportive housing, they might coordinate with that. Beyond that, they don't have the capacity to do literally anything.
So the hospitals fast-track people for release. The local services groups fast-track people off their caseloads. And the police aren't interested in protecting anyone. And you get this bullshit, which is not unlike things I have seen happen.
4: So, again, what should have happened here?
On the first incident, he should have had access to a process that evaluated him for competency and sanity at time of offense in a quick and accessible way.
After that, restoration services should have gotten him on medication to stabilize him with either consistent follow-ups available in the community and assistive services if needed, OR if that was not viable, he, in fact, needed to be involuntarily committed.
Involuntary commitment sucks, y'all! The fact that I have some real power to say "my client is crazy and needs to be evaluated and taken into custody" is deeply fucking scary and uncomfortable, and is one of the hardest parts of my job. But, stepping back and viewing this with as much warmth and humanity as possible (because being objective objectively sucks):
If someone is causing harm and cannot stop, the state has a responsibility to intervene.
If someone is experiencing harm and cannot effectively defend against it, the state has a mandate to intervene.
Involuntary commitment is always applied too broadly, just like imprisonment, but there have been a handful of clients over the years who absolutely 100% needed to be in a hospital, potentially for the rest of their lives, though thank god I don't have to make that call. I can honestly just cross my fingers and hope that the hospital treats them well, that conditional release is achievable, that everything is done right.
Trump, by the way, cut even more federal funding for local and state psychiatric services. Those cuts could be directly responsible for the lack of service availability/accessibility that led to this situation.
What also fucking destroys me is that these kinds of tragedies are not unpredictable. There was a huge long course of behavior that led up to the last escalation. The intervention should have been there. The services should have been there. The fact that they weren't isn't an inevitable consequence of a free society. It's a government that doesn't want to fix this problem.
