Mental Health Needs to be Addressed by the Law

Every day we see examples of the mentally ill being misunderstood and therefore mishandled by law enforcement and then by the District Attorney's Office. One of the mainstays of my platform is that when elected to office, I will take this problem by the horns, address it and put safeguards for the community and the mentally ill into place.

What happens now and very often indeed, is that if there is a mentally ill person in a family and the family needs help controlling the individual there is really no one to call. If the family calls the authorities thinking they are going to get someone trained to deal with the mentally ill, they are woefully wrong. The El Paso police are infamous for shooting and killing the mentally ill. If the individual is not gunned down in his home or front yard he is more often than not taken into custody and charged with a garden variety of crimes, i.e. assault, criminal trespass, etc. The individual spends days, even months, in jail and if there is family, they try to get him out, sorry they ever called for help.

The person is then formally charged by the district attorney's office and it is now time to go to court. The family and the defense attorney explain to the assistant DA that the person is mentally ill and DID NOT POSSESS the requisite intelligence to knowingly or intentionally do anything. You show them doctors' orders, medical history, prescriptions for psychotropic drugs, and they don't care and amazingly they are not trained to understand the legal implications of mental illness on their case and even if they do understand, they are not going to get into trouble with their supervisors by doing the right thing and dismissing the case. They tell you to file your motions for a competency trial... and here we go on the merry go round.

You file your motion for a competency trial and by that time the individual has been in jail and on his meds long enough to understand his surroundings to pass a competency exam. The jury (that would be you) is hauled in and the doctor testifies as to how competent the person is to stand trial. The jury finds the defendant competent and here we go to the actual trial.

Another month or so passes and the individual is still in jail. Here comes the jury again, (that would be you) taken from jobs and out of their homes, and well what do you know. The DA's office dismisses the case because they know they can't win because the person was not on his meds when he got hauled into jail and cannot therefore be held accountable before the law and well, pluss, it's a stupid case and the family wants him home anyway. Here is your dismissal and thank you very much for doing business with us. They then thank you the jurors for coming down and explain to you what great Americans you are but that your services are no longer needed because "the case has been settled."

As District Attorney, I will set up a comprehensive special mental health unit staffed with professionals in the field including lawyers who have dual degrees to review just such cases, to avoid just such scenarios, to listen to what the defense attorney has and to listen to the family. We need to discern in the beginning of a case whether the individual had a criminal episode or a mental health episode and use our limited resources wisely. Why spend money housing someone in jail and bringing in hudreds of jurors when we can work with the County Attorney's office, which has a mental commitment unit (they won't take people with pending charges) to get them into a hospital which is where they belong and on meds?

El Pasoans can no longer afford to ignore this huge problem. With a poorly trained police force and no elected representatives addressing this issue and a sitting district attorney who is business as usual while the jail swells (and the DA himself coming out publicly asking the Sheriff to admit even more people, those who have not been seen by a magistrate...DIMS) with the mentally ill and the jurors are leaving behind work to come listen to a case that will in the end be dismissed because there was no crime, something has got to give.

This is not that difficult to try and fix. However, the problem requires an elected official who admits there is a problem (instead of hiding the mentally ill and chaining them to a radiator in the attic as does my opponent, to the terrible detriment of this community), understands the problem, and hires the right people to deal with it and uses available resources to do so.