Defendants incompetent to stand trial are waiting months — sometimes longer than likely sentences for their alleged crimes — for mental health evaluations and treatment because of a backlog at the state hospital in Pueblo.
A new lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court accuses the state of warehousing mentally ill detainees in county jails, alleges civil rights violations and asks a judge to order much shorter wait times.
It’s the second time in five years that advocates have asked a court to speed up the line into the Colorado Mental Health Institute at Pueblo for people accused of crimes.
As budgets have stagnated or inched lower, the number of people in need of mental health intervention as they drift through the criminal justice system has risen more sharply than the state expected.
Defense attorney Iris Eytan, who filed the lawsuit on Aug. 31, said budget woes may be a reality, but they’re no excuse.
“You can’t use the budget crisis to justify violating people’s constitutional rights. You don’t dump the problem on the most-disenfranchised population in Colorado,” Eytan said. “You fix it. You saw this coming. We sued you five years ago.”
People charged with crimes have a right to understand the charges against them and participate in their own defense.
When in doubt, a judge can order a defendant to undergo a psychological evaluation. Those can be done as defendants wait in jail, at the state mental hospital in Pueblo or in the community.
If defendants are found incompetent, a court orders the state hospital to treat them until they’re ready for trial.
The lawsuit lists examples of people who have waited as long as six months between an order for evaluation and when they were finally admitted to the state hospital.
In the meantime, they sat in jail.
Eytan is asking a federal judge to require the state Department of Human Services, the agency that oversees the hospital, to limit waits to seven days each for evaluation and admission.
Department spokeswoman Liz McDonough declined to explain what’s causing the current holdups. “We can’t comment on pending litigation,” she said.
In 2001, courts ordered 429 mental health evaluations and 87 people to be restored to competency. In 2011, those numbers more than doubled to 1,062 evaluations and 214 admissions, McDonough said.
The same group of lawyers and advocates sued the state in 2006, after the state hospital refused to admit bicycle thief Eugene Zuniga for treatment for three months, despite a court order.
As part of a settlement that followed, the Pueblo hospital added 200 beds to provide court-ordered services and agreed to usher detainees from jail to the hospital within 28 days.
And they did.
But the order expired in 2009, and when it did, wait times immediately began to grow, Eytan alleges.
Detainees in Arapahoe County Sheriff J. Grayson Robinson’s jail are charged with everything from misdemeanors to murder. Between 2010 and 2011, their average wait times to be evaluated and admitted at the state hospital grew by nearly a month, to 87 days.
The situation is harmful to defendants who may rack up new charges thanks to untreated behavioral problems, and it’s costly for the jails who spend as much as double the typical per-day costs to house mentally ill detainees, Robinson said.
“I understand the challenges the state hospital faces: limited staff, limited funds.” Robinson said. “The jails have sadly become the mental health institutions of the United States because we’ve eliminated funding for community programs.”
Jessica Fender: 303-954-1244 or jfender@denverpost.com
