It Could Be Months. . .

. . . And perhaps more than a year before reviews of the Linden Cameron shooting by Salt Lake City police are completed. (Linden, a 13-year-old victim of Asperger’s syndrome, absorbed eleven bullets from a policeman’s service pistol on the night of Sept. 4, yet survived and remains in serious condition.)

Linden Cameron

The link below, to the latest update on Linden’s story, discusses this likelihood. The story was reported and written by Heidi Hatch and Mackenzie Ryan of KJZZ television in Salt Lake City.

https://kjzz.com/news/officer-involved-accountability

Months. Perhaps more than a year.

Months? Why months?!

Mundane reasons. Case backlogs. Scant resources to investigate them. That sort of thing. Since January of 2011, the Salt Lake City area has seen one hundred four shootings by police. Of these, only eight have been ruled “unjustified”–a fair microcosm of the national picture. Charges were filed in just three of the eight “unjustified” shootings, Hatch and Ryan report.

All three of those cases were dismissed.

Nine other unreviewed cases are piled on top of Linden Cameron’s.

And so Linden and his mother Golda Barton will wait. And wait. And wait. The state of waiting and its attendant stress, for one bureaucratic reason or another, is familiar to thousands of families trying to safeguard a mentally ill loved one, or to seek justice for that victim.

Below my September 22 blog on Linden’s case, a reader posted: “I will wait to see all the evidence.” I respect this reader’s sense of fairness. Yet we may never “see all the evidence.” That blog included a murky 36-second excerpt of body-cam recording released by the Salt Lake City police department. It shows a wandering pool of harsh light (presumably the camera light) surrounded by darkness. Linden can be glimpsed walking away from the camera before he disappears into the dark. We hear gunshots when the pool of light finds him again, he is writhing on the sidewalk. Then he turns over onto his left side and stops moving. We can hear him say,

“I don’t feel good. Tell Mom I love her.”

The body-cam footage below apparently covers the full length of the police video. It lasts 1 minute 40 seconds, some of the extra length showing police leaving their patrol car and yelling at Linden before the gunfire. It was posted on YouTube by the website RAW. 

This footage also shows that Linden broke into a run after walking a few paces. The police pursue him in a 45-second footrace, yelling for him to “Get on the ground.” Then the shots and the boy’s moaning voice as he lies wounded on the sidewalk.

And that’s about it.

So: Linden Cameron and his mother, not to mention the police officers involved, probably will have to wait for up to a year, and maybe longer, before the investigative bureaucracy gets around to this case.

The great 19th-century British prime minister William Gladstone is credited with the maxim, “Justice delayed is justice denied.” Gladstone should have stuck around.

In a year’s time, pending investigations often lose their initial urgency. Public opinion and news coverage dissipate. The indignation of civic leaders cools. The cop shooting of a mentally ill boy, which initially drew international attention, grows stale in the files. The investigative bodies–in this case, they include an outside police department and the Salt Lake City department as well–tend to lose whatever incentive they may have had to render judgment against their own. The Linden Cameron case becomes something of an abstraction. Besides, it was dark. The camera dances around. Who, really, can say what happened? (Who, really, by this time, cares?)

“I will wait to see all the evidence.” A reasonable and honorable suspension of judgment.

Bring a book of crossword puzzles or something.

https://noonecaresaboutcrazypeople.com/?s=linden+cameron

“I DON’T FEEL GOOD. TELL MOM I LOVE HER.”

Below is a link to a body-cam video of the Salt Lake City police shooting of the autistic 13-year-old Linden Cameron on the night of September 4. The footage was released on Monday, Sept. 21.

Linden’s mother, Golda Barton, had made the mistake of calling the police to get the boy, who was in a psychotic state, to a hospital. Linden survived the tender attentions of the police and remains in serious condition.

The video contains graphic content that viewers may find disturbing. (Actually, viewers SHOULD find it disturbing!)


I counted eleven shots–eleven!–from the policeman’s service revolver, a count also reported in local news coverage.

It is dark, and so you cannot see Linden being shot. But as the clip ends, you can hear him say: “I don’t feel good. Tell Mom I love her.”


This could have been either of my sons. https://www.sltrib.com/news/2020/09/21/bodycam-shows-salt-lake/

https://noonecaresaboutcrazypeople.com/?s=linden+cameron

“You know what mommy, they didn’t hurt me. I didn’t feel it. I’m a Superman.” –Linden Cameron

. . . But Linden will suffer for the rest of his life. Most of the bullets fired by Salt Lake City police on September 4 into his 13-year-old body–shoulders, intestines, bladder–are still there and may never be removed. The shots that shattered both his ankles apparently didn’t lodge.

Linden Cameron. Photo Credit: Wesley Barton

The “investigation” into the cops’ behavior drags into its tenth day. Salt Lake City police promised the release of body-cam footage by “10 business days after the incident.” That would be Friday.


For background on Linden’s story–which has drawn international media attention–see more of my blogs on noonecaresaboutcrazypeople.com


For recent updates, click on the links below:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/linden039s-medical-bills


https://meaww.com/unarmed-autistic-boy-13-shot-by-salt-lake-city-cops-has-bullets-in-his-body-lifelong-injuries


https://heavy.com/news/2020/09/golda-barton/ 

https://noonecaresaboutcrazypeople.com/?s=linden+cameron

ANOTHER BRILLIANT INDICTMENT OF OUR PRISONS!

I wrote my fingers to the bone on the U.S. criminal justice abyss in my book and after it was published. Nothing changed, and it sickened and sickens me. Congratulations on this book, Christine Montross. Thank you for bringing it to my attention, Gail Freedman.

via The New York Times

Where the Sick Get Sicker and the Sane Are Driven Mad: Behind Bars

WAITING FOR AN ECHO
The Madness of American Incarceration
By Christine Montross

When Christine Montross approached the end of her residency program in psychiatry, she met with a mentor for help evaluating two attractive job opportunities. Ignoring both options, her adviser raised the possibility of a third: “What about the prisons?” Montross balked at this unsolicited, unwanted suggestion. She deemed it an imprudent, even absurd use of her training, given the nation’s dearth of psychiatrists and broad demand for mental-health services. “Why would I want to work in the prisons?” Montross wondered. “Why devote my time and attention to people who had committed crimes when there were so many innocent people who needed care?”

Read the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/books/review/waiting-for-an-echo-christine-montross.html?action=click&module=Features&pgtype=Homepage

A Political Breakthrough for Mental Healthcare Reform!

In one breathtaking stroke, Kamala Harris has just widened the contours of presidential campaign history and thrown light into the darkest corridors of shameful human suffering.

On Monday, Harris affirmed that America is in the throes of a mental healthcare crisis. And she backed up her ringing assertion by adopting all the major goals of advocates for enlightened mental healthcare and fairness in our nation’s policies and practices. While several of her rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination have put forth their own reform proposals, none matches the sweep of the Harris plan, and none has triggered such rejoicing in the ranks of reform advocates. 

In the words of the premier advocate-warrior DJ Jaffe: “Wow! Wow!” Jaffe added that the Harris plan embraced “everything we’ve been looking for to help [the] seriously mentally ill.”

With these gestures, Harris has frontally attacked a century’s worth of neglect, denial, obfuscation, and wasted spending that define the country’s medieval approach to its most helpless citizens.

Among her plan’s many, desperately needed virtues:

The Harris plan reinvigorates the concept of “justice” in dealing with the mentally ill; yet it implies a range of practical economic benefits as well. Her agenda attacks the widening cone of unnecessary social cost and structural blight that proceeds from the stricken individual through the community, the city, the rural landscape, and our vast failed archipelago.

In calling for a doubling of the nation’s psychiatric beds, for example, Harris opens a path to significant reduction of taxpayer money spent on the glut of afflicted people behind bars: Each year more than 2 million people with serious mental illness are thrown in jail, often because care centers have no room. Incarcerating an inmate with mental illness costs $31,000 annually, while community mental health services cost about $10,000. 

Harris’s recommendations are protean. They contemplate the needs of psychically damaged veterans; telemedicine as a resource in under-served rural communities; the elimination of foolish laws that prevent family members from learning the state of a relative in hospital care; an increase in crisis-intervention teams; criminal-justice diversion for people in psychoses arrested for a crime; education for a judiciary too often clueless as to the nature of mental illness, and “Medicare-for-all” coverage for the mentally ill.

And it calls for the abolishment of the evil known as solitary confinement. Other Democrats have attacked this scourge as well, though that is hardly a discredit. Solitary confinement cannot be excoriated too many times.

The Harris plan is not exactly sailing in calm political waters, of course. The cynicism and bad faith that now besmirch our civic discourse might well capsize this vessel of reforms. Some pundits will almost surely write it off as a desperation gesture from a candidate struggling to gain traction in the polls–or as a cosmetic ploy to soften Harris’s residual image as a remorseless prosecutor.

Such dismissal would be as shameful–as borderline-decadent–as is the present state of mental healthcare itself. Kamala Harris’s proposed reforms are what they are, without reference to the candidate. They cry out to be lifted up from the ruck of conventional campaign promises and examined (and re-examined, and debated, and circulated“, and published) on their own merits. 

And they are something beyond themselves, as well: they are a blazing collective affirmation of the power of witness: persistent, retail, on-the-ground political advocacy. To the politics of personal persuasion and response, if you like.

Leslie Carpenter and Kamala Harris Photo Courtesy Leslie Carpenter

Virtually every Democratic candidate who has spoken up about mental health-care reform has been educated on the soil of Iowa, face-to-face, by the phenomenal team of Leslie and Scott Carpenter. They and their fellow advocates–my friends and models of informed passion and persistence–are living testaments to the ideal of Making a Difference. Most of these people have struggled for years, in small groups, in letters and emails to the powerful, and against fatigue and hopelessness. Nearly every one of them is closely related to a victim of serious mental illness. 

Now, just maybe, is their moment.

Examining Solitary Confinement

The leading Democratic candidates for president in 2020 have at long last agreed that abolishing this atrocity is an essential part of criminal-justice reform. It is up to us to hold them to their words.

When you hear or read the words “solitary confinement,” what images form in your mind?

A naughty inmate spending some time in a kind of “time out” space wearing a hang-dog expression?

A lonely prisoner in a tiny dark cell gazing at light from the slit of a window, with maybe half a bowl of dirty drinking water at his feet?

A mentally ill man who, after 112 consecutive days of solitary, has just severed his penis with a razor and flushed it down his cell’s toilet? 

One of these things is not like the others.

All three images are rooted in the dark dominion of solitary confinement. Only one of them burns through the fog of euphemism and forces a reckoning with a terrible truth—in this case, one of the most perverse, destructive, and unnecessary varieties of soul-murder yet devised by man.

The topic “solitary confinement” has been raised lately (and gingerly, and fleetingly) by several candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination: raised as an agenda item in their calls for repairing the fissures in America’s criminal-justice system. (Criminal-justice reform is tightly intertwined with reform of our negligent systems of mental healthcare in America.)

Dorothea Dix

The candidates have in turn been influenced—inspired—by the efforts of a bright new coalition of mental-health reform advocates: parents, mostly, spurred to action by the death or deep psychosis of a beloved child. Polite yet unyielding, ferociously informed, they amount to a neo-Dorothea Dix approach to getting justice for the dispossessed. 

Iowa is their perfectly chosen beachhead. Not only does the state offer an early concentration of corndog-chewing candidates for them to buttonhole. Iowa City is the home of the turbo-charged advocacy team of Scott and Leslie Carpenter. Armed with an exhaustive five-point bill of particulars for mental healthcare reform compiled by the California advocate DeDe Moon Ranahan, the Carpenters essentially have brought the grass roots onto equal footing with the political elite—on this issue, at least.

But why shine the spotlight on solitary confinement when the justice reform agendas are crowded with so many other “big-ticket” demands? Cutting the U.S. prison population in half comes to mind, as do ending the notorious “cash bail” system that keeps poor young inmates locked up only because they can’t afford otherwise; or tightening up on police oversight; or legalizing marijuana; or abolishing private prisons. 

Here is the reason: I sense that of all these important, difficult-to-achieve goals, the abolishing of solitary is among the easiest to bring up and then dismiss: the one most vulnerable to lip service.

Thomas Edward Silverstein

And that would be a colossal shame. Stuffing sentient human beings into small, dark, fetid enclosures and leaving them there is about the worst thing it is possible to do to one’s fellow man. The American record for duration in solitary was held by a triple murderer named Thomas Silverstein, who died just last May at age 67. He’d spent more than half his life in isolation. 

It borders on the impossible to find shared humanity with a monster like Silverstein. Yet traces of his humanity struggle to declare themselves like green shoots through cracked pavement. “It’s almost more humane to kill someone immediately than it is to intentionally bury a man alive,” he wrote. For one superb writer’s searching attempt, read Pete Earley’s masterful 1992 book, The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison.

Or return for a moment to the lost soul who severed his penis with a razor. That would be the mentally ill inmate identified by his initials, J.I., a solitary inmate at Broward County Jail in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. On the night of September 2018, jail guards, alerted by prisoners’ shouting in a lockdown unit, rushed to the scene, where they beheld J.I., his hands and forearms bloody, who told them: “I have a real medical emergency. I just cut my penis off and flushed it down the toilet. I have no need for it anymore.”

J.I., who survived, had sat in solitary for 112 consecutive days. He’d been sent there for yelling at staff members. Records showed that guards had been negligent in monitoring his therapeutic needs. 1

Solitary is patently barbaric; bereft of any use (other than convenience and a lust for inflicting psychic pain).  It is a legalized yet likely unconstitutional torture which, I have come to believe, is slightly more heinous even than the death penalty: its victims, while not dead, experience death as their own observers, existing in claustrophobic isolation and silence and darkness and decay, with no definable release awaiting them. 

And so in order to tolerate it as public policy or even as a thought, some self-anesthetizing helps. (Those charged with actually imposing it on human beings presumably develop tougher psychic scar tissue.)  “Solitary confinement” is a term useful for the necessary numbing: an abstraction, one of those “Orwellian” constructions that serve more to camouflage than to evoke their full, and usually terrifying implications. 

That very abstraction is dangerous. It can too easily lead to evaporation.  

This blog, then, is a plea to those presidential candidates who have made the abolition of solitary confinement a part of their criminal-justice reform demands: Do not let this happen. Honor the constituency that has materialized in Iowa and exists throughout the nation. Keep this issue alive. 

In subsequent blogs I will trace the peculiar origins of solitary confinement in America, and will look into some of the lesser-known forms of its use—for example, as an instrument of control for juvenile inmates and even schoolchildren.

I will close this blog with a soaring testimony of hope, resilience, faith, and self-reclamation written by a former criminal and solitary inmate named Thomas Tarrants, and published in the August 19 edition of Christianity Today. 2 It was sent to me by my friend, the literary scholar Harold K. Bush of St. Louis University. Thank you, amigo.

The Soul Grows Weary

Delusional man who threatened to kill strangers no longer barred from owning guns by Oregon Courts

via The Oregonian

By Aimee Green | The Oregonian/OregonLive agreen@oregonian.com
The Oregonian/OregonLive

The Oregon Court of Appeals on Wednesday reversed a southern Oregon judge’s decision to commit a man to the state psychiatric hospital and revoke his gun ownership rights after he’d threatened to kill strangers who he believed were watching him through power lines and robotic birds.

The man’s case illustrates Oregon’s high legal bar for forcing people with mental illness into receiving treatment and forbidding them from having guns.

The case also highlights battling ideologies: One argues that people who have been diagnosed with mental illness and have threatened to kill others should be sent to the state hospital for involuntary treatment for up to 180 days. The other argues that forcing vulnerable people to receive treatment without significant evidence they’re truly a danger violates their civil liberties and can have devastating effects on them.

The man in this case was identified in court papers only as 43-year-old “J.P.”

Alexander Cambier, a Portland public defender who represented J.P.’s interests before the Appeals Court, said committing someone for up to six months represents a significant “deprivation of liberty” that must be backed up by evidence of the person’s future dangerousness.

“In a case like this the state is seeking to put someone in a hospital room — which can look a lot like a jail cell, i.e. locked doors and bars over the windows — not because they have actually hurt someone but because the state is predicting that they will hurt someone in the future,” Cambier told The Oregonian/OregonLive.

The Appeals Court said prosecutors didn’t legal justify the case against J.P. because he didn’t have the means to actually acquire a gun and probably didn’t have the physical strength to hang people as he had threatened.

J.P. had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and a supervisor at a mental health clinic was worried he’d act on his delusions to “kill” or “hang” strangers who he thought were members of the mafia, according to an Appeals Court summary of the case.

J.P.’s encounter with the mental health system began after his mother became gravely concerned when he sent her photos he took of a man at a bus stop and people in cars because he thought they were monitoring him, according to the summary. He also said he thought the roofers working on the house across the street from his grown daughter’s home were in on it, too.

Within a few weeks, he called his mother and announced he was ready to act, stating: “I’m ready to get these people. Whatever means necessary, I need to do this today,” according to the summary.

He added: “I don’t care how I have to do it. I’ll kill them. I’ll hang them. I’ll do whatever I have to. I need to deal with this.”

During a hearing, Douglas County Circuit Judge William Marshall said he considered J.P. a “real danger … to other people,” in part because he’d at one point successfully convinced his daughter to briefly loan him an unloaded shotgun.

“This illness is long-term,” Marshall said. “It’s not disappearing. It’s continuing to invade him.”

But in reversing Marshall’s ruling, the Appeals Court noted there was no evidence that J.P. followed his “verbal threats” with an “overt act” that indicated he was “highly likely” to end someone’s life.

“There was no evidence in the record … that the threat was anything more than the result of his delusions and agitation,” the Appeals Court wrote.

The court noted several other cases in which other people didn’t meet that bar, including a woman who had made threats to kill her neighbor’s children and put their heads on her fence and a man who threatened to kill a police officer by telling him he was a “dead man walking.”

It also noted the case of a woman who it determined had been lawfully committed: She fired a bullet into the wall dividing her apartment from her neighbor’s. That proved she was highly likely to be dangerous in the future, the Appeals Court said.

J.P., the man at the center of Wednesday’s ruling, was civilly committed in October 2017. He has long since left the state hospital. But the ruling has the effect of restoring his right to possess or own guns. Such a prohibition would have lasted indefinitely unless he successfully convinced the state’s Psychiatric Security Review Board to restore those rights.

The opinion was made by a three-judge panel of the Appeals Court: Rex Armstrong, Douglas Tookey and Scott Shorr. Read the opinion here.

— Aimee Green

agreen@oregonian.com

An Ongoing Barbaric National Disgrace

I have written about the state-enforced incarceration, torture (via solitary confinement), and medical and inhumane neglect of young Tyler West of Fruitport, Michigan, since I began this blog nearly two years ago.

File:Amy Klobuchar, official portrait, 113th Congress.jpg
Senator Amy Klobuchar

I have included mention of this mentally ill, ridiculously over-prosecuted victim’s plight in nearly every talk I have given. I’ve contacted journalists, advocates, and elected federal and state officials in and around Michigan. (Senator from the neighboring state of Minnesota, sometime mental health reform advocate, and perhaps presidential hopeful Amy Klobuchar, I am looking at you. https://twitter.com/amyklobuchar/status/705052728171634688

Senator Debbie Stabenow

Progressive Senator Debbie Stabenow of Tyler’s home state, Michigan, https://www.stabenow.senate.gov/about/issues/excellence-in-mental-health-act can you possibly have remained uninformed about Tyler’s and his family’s nightmarish ordeal?)

No one answers. Silence prevails among people in a position to rescue Tyler and elevate him to a national symbol of our debased mental healthcare systems: a silence as absolute as that which surrounds Tyler when he is repeatedly thrown into solitary confinement for reasons undisclosed to his parents.

No one. No one. No one, on the evidence, cares about crazy people.

It causes me lacerating psychic pain to think about Tyler West and his inexplicable Bedlam-like imprisonment. (For details, see my other blogs about Tyler on this site.) My helplessness, and his family’s helplessness, in seeking justice for him exhaust and infuriate me no end. I no longer write about him as much as I used to, as much as I should.

The one person in this world who sustains any shred of hope within me, and who inspires me to speak about about Tyler yet again, is his courageous mother, Kimberlee Cooper-West. Kimberlee is a religious and civic-minded woman; and although struggling with her own grief, she has never given up on her violated adopted son. I have quoted many times from her impassioned writing. And today, reading through the Facebook file of my colleague in advocacy Dee Dee Moon Ranahan, I came upon her latest cry from the heart. It follows below. Ms. Stabenow? Ms. Klobuchar? Detroit Free Press? National NAMI? In this season of love and charity and reverence and soul-reclamation, to paraphrase Atticus Finch: “For God’s sake . . . do your duty!”

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS COUNTRY? by Kimberlee Cooper West

Wish I had good news to share with ya all.

November 8 was our son Tyler’s 20th birthday. We were unable to say “Happy Birthday” as he was in lock down for five days. Days later, we drove a little over an hour to Richard Handlon Correctional Prison in Ionia, Michigan. (Tyler is number #113697.) We had cake with him. He made a cake from two honeybuns, smashed peanut M&M’s, and a melted Snickers bar on top. He’s inventive. We sang “Happy Birthday” to him.

He’s still our boy. Few mention him. Our heart breaks for what we’ve lost. This is Tyler’s third year away for his birthday. Next, he will miss Thanksgiving and Christmas. He hasn’t been given counseling, education, training, or the proper medications. He’s been beaten up four times since he was incarcerated.

Why couldn’t mental health professionals keep him in an inpatient psychiatric hospital? For the love of God there was no good reason to release our son from the hospital. His safety was compromised. No one was responsible. He was nearly shot at for trespassing. He was an inpatient five days prior to his arrest. He was delusional and hearing voices. What is wrong with this country? Why is there no long-term treatment?

This is a brain disease, ya all. Maybe we should start locking up every grandma and grandpa who is violent or disorderly from Alzheimer’s. Serious mental illness is a disease. It is prodromal to Alzheimer’s. Prisons are corporations. Their goal is money. They need prisoners. Caught up in the system — it’s a real thing.

We are receiving a criminal justice system education. Months are now years. One caseworker, Ms. Williams, calls many people names like dumb, retarded, idiots and pedophiles. Everyone in Ty’s facility is either mentally ill or autistic. She told Tyler, a 19-year-old kid who was only supposed to be in prison for two months, “You’re doing 15 years.” It leaves me to wonder how many have given up from her words.

Ty’s not even provided an inhaler for asthma and chronic lung disease. He has autism and a serious mental illness. When he was in school he was never suspended. He was a target for bullies which was our main concern. Incarceration never crossed our minds. On his birthday, I sent his appeal papers certified to a judge. Hopefully, he will give him an appellate lawyer.

http://www.soonerthantomorrow.com

Ty in prison -Credit Kimberlee Cooper West

Kids With Cognitive Problems Can Be Locked Up for Years Without a Trial

This excellent Mother Jones piece by Samantha Michaels pinpoints one of the worst ongoing atrocities in our criminal-justice system–the indefinite pre-trial incarceration of young mentally ill defendants. This broken system cries out for restorative, enlightened oversight at the federal level.

via Mother Jones

holwichaikawee/Getty

By the time he turned 15, Jesus G. was hearing voices and having suicidal thoughts. It was early 2013, and he’d been living at the Central Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles for more than a year, though he’d never been tried or found guilty of a crime.

In late 2011, Jesus’ younger brother accused him of molesting him, but Jesus denied the allegations. The clock stopped on his case months after that, when a doctor decided that, due to his hallucinations and immaturity, he wouldn’t understand what was happening in court.

As with adults, when a kid like Jesus is declared incompetent to stand trial, the state can detain him while trying to improve his mental functioning and knowledge of court procedures. But while California law limits the amount of time adults can be confined—often in hospitals—during this process, no such cap exists for children, who are regularly held in juvenile hall instead. As the months passed, Jesus and his attorneys wondered when he would ever get out.

In California and across much of the country, children with cognitive problems routinely languish in custody for months or years while judges determine whether they’ll be able to pick up the skills needed for a fair trial. Most states don’t have comprehensive programs to help these kids become “competent,” as the courts call it, referring to someone who has the ability to assist their attorney with their defense and possesses a solid understanding of the charges and proceedings against them. In one egregious case, according to a legal director at the National Juvenile Defender Center, children were asked to watch episodes of Law & Order to prepare for their trials.

According to California Assembly member Mark Stone, about 300 of the estimated 7,000 wards in California’s juvenile justice system last year were not getting the help they needed to become competent for trial. Now, lawmakers in Sacramento are considering a bill that would limit how long kids are detained after a judge finds them mentally unfit. And it would spell out the services they can receive to get up to speed. Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a similar bill last year after critics protested that dangerous, emotionally unstable teens might be let loose.

But this year Stone hopes a compromise will be more palatable: In his new bill, most kids could be detained six months while trying to become mentally competent, but those accused of certain violent crimes could be held for 18 months. Some advocates say a year and a half is still far too long to hold a child without trial, but others say it’s a step in the right direction for a system that often feels haphazard at best and an absolute mess at worst.

Before he got to juvenile hall, Jesus was struggling at home. He’d recently moved to California with his mom and told adults at school he was depressed and wanted to die; he tried cutting his wrist because he claimed his stepdad abused him. At age 14, after he was locked up, a medical examiner found he was functioning in some ways like a six-year-old. “For him to understand the reality of what’s transpiring and understand the process, what people are doing with him and what he needs to do in his own defense…those are going to be difficult things for him,” the doctor told the court.

The fight for better juvenile competency laws has roots back in the 1990s. Across the country, a jump in homicides led to a superpredator panic, and delinquent teens were depicted as dangerous criminals. New laws made it easier for them to be transferred to the adult system, where a third strike could land them in prison for life.

By then, courts already had procedures for dealing with adults who weren’t mentally fit for trial, and many states started to apply the same standards to children. But that hasn’t worked out well, says Thomas Grisso, a psychologist in Massachusetts and a leading expert on these issues. Like adults, kids can struggle to understand court proceedings because of a mental illness or an intellectual disability. But many kids aren’t ready for trial simply because they’re immature. Their brains haven’t developed fully, or they haven’t picked up the average knowledge an adult would have about courts, Grisso says, so they require different types of services to get up to speed.

California does have a separate competency law for juveniles, and back in 2007 it was the first state to acknowledge that immaturity could make someone unfit for court. But since then it has lagged behind. “California ended up with one foot moving forward and the other one stuck in the mud,” says Janet Warren, a psychiatry professor at the University of Virginia who helped develop procedures in her state for juvenile competency that are now hailed as a model.

National guidelines written by Grisso and his colleague Kimberly Larson encourage lawmakers to keep kids in the least restrictive environment possible while they study to become competent—ideally at home. In California, however, “juvenile halls have become an unfortunate default holding place for incompetent youth,” public defenders in Los Angeles wrote in an amicus brief, noting that the state doesn’t use residential group homes enough. And California has no hospital beds for these kids, says Jim Salio, president of the Chief Probation Officers of California. “Because there’s no other place to house them, we end up with these minors in juvenile hall. They really should be in some other place.”

Experts recognize that locking them up can worsen their mental health problems, make them less likely to graduate high school, and boost their odds of committing crimes later. In 1972, the Supreme Court ruled it was unconstitutional to detain anyone indefinitely during treatment for competency problems; a person could not be “held more than the reasonable period of time,” the justices wrote. But what’s reasonable? In California, Salio says, some teens are held two or three years.

According to a study in Virginia, most kids can develop the skills needed for trial within three months by studying court procedures with an expert and receiving treatment for any mental health problems if needed. After six months, if a child has not become competent, it’s unlikely he ever will.

During his year-plus at juvenile hall, Jesus continued his schooling but received no services to prepare him for trial, his attorneys told the court, including no ongoing treatment to deal with his hallucinations, depression, and suicidal thoughts. The probation office explained a committee focused on competency programming was still “in the planning stages” and that Jesus probably couldn’t start until the following year.

Albert C., a 15-year-old accused of assault and gun possession, was also locked up in Los Angeles after a judge found him unfit for trial. His programming, according to an amicus brief, involved just 90 minutes a week of going over worksheets with court vocabulary, followed by a quiz. The person who administered the worksheets hadn’t graduated from college or received much training. “He was essentially warehoused for a year with no therapeutic services or treatment,” wrote the Pacific Juvenile Defender Center and local public defenders, noting that doctors recommended he take medicine for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

It doesn’t have to be that way. In Virginia, most kids with cognitive problems stay at home while they prepare for their trials. The state has hundreds of trained forensic evaluators who meet with them there a few times a week, typically over three to four months, using an individualized curriculum with interactive animated software, flashcards, workbooks, coloring books, board games, verbal conversation, and role playing. Florida, Louisiana, and Maryland also have comprehensive, state-wide programs for incompetent kids. But some states like California face pressure to spend their money on more hospital beds for the growing number of incompetent adults left languishing in jails. “To put juvenile competence as a financial burden on top of that makes me pessimistic about a lot of states suddenly getting on board,” Grisso says.

Virginia experts counter that it’s cheaper to do it their way. Warren estimates children in her state become fit for trial at a cost of about $5,000 each, while it takes $200 a day to detain a kid in juvenile hall and $600 a day to keep someone in a psychiatric facility. In other words, a few months of treatment and education could cost three and a half times more in juvie than at a kid’s home.

Jesus and Albert both fought their pretrial detention. Neither kid had much luck. Jesus was held in juvenile hall for about 16 months before he was finally released. Albert stayed for about a year until a judge declared him competent and he pleaded guilty to his crimes. In his case, a judge ruled that although local protocols suggested kids shouldn’t be held for more than about four months during competency treatment, that didn’t carry the force of law in California.

Last year, the California Legislature passed a bill that would have put a six-month cap into law, with support from the Chief Probation Officers of California, but the governor vetoed it amid concerns that kids with aggressive behavior would get out of custody too soon. Assembly member Stone tried to put more teeth into the bill this year, with a six-month cap for most kids and an 18-month cap for those accused of certain violent crimes, including murder and rape as well as certain acts of sexual abuse, like the ones Jesus was accused of.

The new bill would lay out the types of services that courts could consider for incompetent kids, things like therapy and medication instead of just workbooks with court vocabulary. And it would encourage courts to look for options besides juvenile hall while still considering public safety, and require them to dismiss the cases of incompetent kids who are only accused of misdemeanors. Lawmakers have until Friday to vote on the proposal.

In the meantime, children are waiting. Dale Major, an attorney in San Francisco, says one of his teen clients has spent about three years locked up without trial, spread out over multiple arrests, after being declared incompetent because of post-traumatic stress disorder, paranoia, attention deficit disorder, and developmental immaturity. “Even though he’s in juvenile court, he’s now 18, sitting in a county jail, getting no services,” he says. “The kid has had no childhood.”

Demand Justice-Virginia Gave Mentally Ill Teen Two Life Sentences For non-Capital Crime!

Chris Sharikas at a young age started suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and ended up committing a violent crime, a crime where his sentencing guidelines called for a 7 to 11 year sentence.  The state knew that Chris suffered from a mental illness and sent him to a hospital for a short period with the hope that he would become competent to stand trial.  The State returned Chris to Arlington County for sentencing.  The county jail determined that Chris did not need the medications prescribed for his mental condition and decided to use a different approach.  Chris’ mental state deteriorated to the extent that he was no longer capable of showing remorse.  This angered the Judge and he gave Chris maximum sentences.

At a Writ of Habeas Corpus hearing the Judge verbally confirmed the long sentences because he did not believe that Chris could recover from his illness.  As a result Chris is serving multiple life sentences in a system of punishment because he is ill.  Chris who never killed anyone has a longer sentence than the sniper who killed 22 people.

Since when in the United States do we sentence someone to prison simply because they are sick?

Please sign this petition to Governor Terry McAuliffe and ask him to pardon Chris so that he can receive care from a mental health care facility and not suffer a lifetime of punishment because he has a mental illness.

Visit: Change.org

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