More than three years after Isaac Zamora went on a rampage in Washington state, killing six people, including a sheriff's deputy and a friend, prosecutors and defense attorneys are preparing for what may be the final legal battle, reports the Seattle Times. A bench trial next month will determine whether Zamora will remain a hospital patient or be transferred to prison to serve four life sentences.
The state Department of Social and Health Services wants the 31-year-old to be imprisoned, saying he poses a security risk and no longer requires hospital-based psychiatric treatment. The case is a test of a 2010 law that allows the state to request that mentally ill criminal offenders such as Zamora be imprisoned rather than treated indefinitely at a state mental hospital. Criminal defendants who are found not guilty by reason of insanity are sent to the forensic unit of a state hospital for treatment. So-called forensic patients, after treatment, can petition the courts for release if their mental health is stabilized to the point that they could re-enter society. A judge makes the decision, with input from the state's mental-health experts and attorneys.
Read full entry »Texas officials say they can't obey a court order forcing them to move more than 150 mentally incompetent prisoners to psychiatric hospitals by June 1 because they don't have enough space, staff or money to do so, reports the Austin American-Statesman. The Texas attorney general's office has asked District Judge Orlinda Naranjo to review her January decision forcing the Department of State Health Services to start moving all current "forensic commitments" to state psychiatric hospitals. All such prisoners who arrive after June 1 would have to be moved to a psychiatric hospital within 21 days of a judge's order.
Complying with the court order would cost between $39 million and $55.2 million, according to a motion for a new trial filed by the attorney general's office this month. "The short timelines set forth in the court's order makes it physically, fiscally and logistically impossible for DSHS to comply and indicates a lack of appreciation for the magnitude of the task and the complications inherent in implementing the terms of the order," the state wrote in its motion. The attorney general has also appealed the ruling with the state's 3rd Court of Appeals. Naranjo's ruling stemmed from a 2007 lawsuit filed by Disability Rights Texas, a federally funded organization that is an advocate for people with disabilities, including mental illness. Over the past two years, the average prisoner spent six months in jail waiting for a hospital bed, Naranjo wrote in her order.
Read full entry »The Supreme Court a quarter century ago said it was unconstitutional to execute an insane person, and it extended that ban to the mentally retarded in 2002. Lyle Denniston in Scotusblog says the court never has decided whether an individual has any right, under the Constitution or any federal law, to actually be competent in order to take part in a federal habeas review of his case or to have the case put off indefinitely. Yesterday, it agreed to rule on those issues, accepting cases from Arizona and Ohio.
That brings brings the court back to an exploration of the rights of individuals who have been sentenced to death in murder cases and then are found to be mentally incompetent. The court has not sorted out what other legal rights the mentally ill on death row have when, having failed in challenges in state court, they turn to federal courts to press their legal claims. Officials in 17 states joined in urging the Court to spell out what a federal court is to do in a habeas case when a death-row inmate is found to be incapable — because of a mental defect — of helping out his lawyers in pursuing a habeas challenge.
Read full entry »Investigators will enlist the help of psychological experts to craft a profile of John Shick with the hope of understanding why he shot six people, killing one, inside Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, says the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Knowing his motives -- and whether there were warning signs -- could help prevent similar attacks in the future.
Law enforcement officials have spoken to the 30-year-old Shick's parents, had seen some of his medical records and were still sorting through ample evidence collected from his apartment to learn more about him and his mental health history. "There's a lot of evidence that, from a layperson's perspective, we don't completely understand," District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. said after meeting with police detectives. He said psychologists and psychiatrists will help investigators decipher the items -- including handwritten messages in notebooks and on walls, bottles, and wicks investigators think were the makings of Molotov cocktails, and a printed brochure, apparently available to the public, providing Western Psych's floor plans.
Read full entry »More than half of the people in Texas' youth prisons have a moderate or high need for mental health care, and officials should improve their early intervention efforts to help those young people before they end up behind bars, reports the Associated Press. Cherie Townsend, executive director of the Texas Juvenile Justice Department, told legislators this week that more than 52 percent of teens and other youngsters held at the state's six juvenile detention facilities have been diagnosed with at least moderate mental health problems.
Including those with at least some kind of mental health care needs would make that tally much higher, she said. "The numbers are increasing," Townsend told members of the Texas House Corrections Committee. Townsend's department was created after the Legislature voted last year to merge the Texas Youth Commission, which had run the prison system for teens, and the Texas Juvenile Probation Commission, which had been in charge of county-run youth probation programs. Supporters said the merger could save Texas as much as $150 million in the first two years of the new department's existence, while also improving mental health and rehabilitation programs for troubled youth.
Read full entry »A third Chardon, Oh., High School student has died in the shooting attack by T.J. Lane, 17, on Monday, says the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Lane, 17, appeared...
Read full entry »Convicted killers at the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo help care for prisoners with Alzheimer's disease and other types of dementia, assisting...
Read full entry »Years after an alarming series of suicides by inmates in state prison segregation units, Massachusetts has reached a landmark agreement with advocacy groups to provide better care for prisoners with severe mental illnesses, the Boston Globe reports.
The agreement, which needs a judge’s final approval, calls for the Department of Correction to maintain two new units at high-level security prisons as alternatives to disciplinary segregation for prisoners with mental illness. The full article is available only to paid subscribers.
Read full entry »Texas routinely violates the constitutional rights of mentally incompetent prisoners by forcing them to stay in jail for up to six months before moving them to psychiatric hospitals, a judge ruled this week. State District Judge Orlinda Naranjo ruled that the Department of State Health Services must start moving "forensic commitments" — people accused of crimes who have been ruled incompetent to stand trial because of mental illness — to state psychiatric hospitals within 21 days of receiving a judge's order, reports the Austin American-Statesman.
Over the past two years , the average prisoner spent six months in jail waiting for a hospital bed, the ruling states. "Keeping incompetent pretrial criminal defendants confined in county jail for unreasonable periods of time violates the incompetent detainees' due process rights as guaranteed by the Texas Constitution," Naranjo wrote. The ruling stems from a 2007 lawsuit filed by Disability Rights Texas, a federally funded organization that advocates for people with disabilities, including mental illness. In that lawsuit, the group claimed that the health department regularly refuses to take forensic commitments because the hospitals do not have space for them.
Read full entry »As mental health calls to police and social service groups increase, law enforcement agencies are investing in extra training to help officers untangle situations ranging from erratic behavior to drug overdoses to suicide attempts, reports the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The paper said some counties have seen mental health 911 calls, including suicides and attempts, increase by more than 25 percent in the past two years. There's no clear explanation for the increase, but theories include unemployment and financial stress, the struggles of returning military veterans and lack of access to mental health services.
Jon Roesler, a state Health Department epidemiology supervisor, said greater access to powerful anti-depressants and painkillers may contribute to higher suicide rates and more drug overdose calls. Other sources said social changes may be a factor, including the isolation of technology, where families are communicating electronically rather than face to face.
Read full entry »Jared Loughner's best chance of avoiding conviction and a possible death penalty in last year's Tucson shootings will be if he is found incompetent to stand trial because of his mental illness, says the Arizona Republic. The odds are against that happening: Most criminal defendants are found competent to stand trial, especially in high-profile cases.
The next-best hope for the man accused of last year's mass shooting near Tucson is to mount an insanity defense, which, contrary to popular perception, is used in fewer than 1 percent of all criminal trials and is successful only about a quarter of the time it is used. "It's the biggest loser defense known to man," said Donna Elm, federal public defender for the Middle District of Florida. "It's so rare that the news goes through the entire defense community when someone wins one." Loughner, 23, is charged with 49 felonies arising from the Jan. 8, 2011, shootings outside a supermarket near Tucson where U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was meeting with constituents.
Read full entry »Los Angeles County jailers are more likely to use force against mentally ill inmates than other prisoners, says a Sheriff's Department report quoted by the Los Angeles Times that acknowledges the lockups need specially trained staff to reduce the violence. About one third of the 582 deputy use-of-force cases in the jails last year involved inmates with mental health histories. About 15 percent of the 15,000 inmates are classified as mentally ill.
The numbers provide a more detailed picture of the confrontations between deputies and inmates, an issue that has sparked intense scrutiny over the last few months and prompted a heated debate yesterday between Sheriff Lee Baca and some L.A. County supervisors. Federal authorities are investigating specific allegations of deputy misconduct and excessive force and last year even smuggled a cellphone into the jail as part of the probe. The disproportionate number of mentally ill inmates involved in altercations with deputies is a new element in the jail controversy.
As California shifts supervision of thousands of newly released state prisoners to local probation agencies, ex-convicts are arriving with incomplete medical records and more serious mental illnesses than anticipated, the Los Angeles Times reports. Mental health officials are scrambling to provide appropriate and often costly treatment. "At the start, every day [ ] there was a crisis," said Dr. Marvin Southard, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health. "There was somebody we didn't know what to do with."
In some cases, released inmates have had to be immediately transferred to hospitals or residential centers for psychiatric care. A new state law aimed at reducing prison crowding requires that certain nonviolent convicts serve their time in county lockups rather than state prisons. It also makes counties — rather than the state parole agency — responsible for supervising such inmates after their release. Mental illness and drug addiction are common in California prisons, where more than half of inmates report a recent mental health problem and two-thirds report a drug abuse problem.
The shootings of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others in Tucson a year ago highlighted the issue of getting care for people with untreated mental illness...
Read full entry »Thousands of violent incidents occur every year in California's psychiatric hospitals, but very few are treated as crimes, reports NPR as part of an ongoing series. An exception was last year's murder of a hospital staffer by a patient. It's been a challenge for the criminal justice and mental health systems to figure out how to deal with assaults by the mentally ill.
Violence in California's psychiatric hospitals has been increasing, partly because the kind of patients treated at the hospitals has changed. Generally, people with mental illness aren't dangerous. These days, 90 percent of the patients in California's mental hospitals are committed by the criminal justice system. They've been found not guilty by reason of insanity, for example, or incompetent to stand trial. The spike in violence followed the adoption of a plan imposed by the Justice Department in 2006 and 2007 to remedy "horrifying" cases of abuse and neglect. Treatment improved but, unexpectedly perhaps, violence got worse.
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