U.S. courthouse
The federal courthouse in Harrisburg
(Matt Miller, PennLive)
The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania will challenge the state Department of Human Services in federal court next week over charges that it is failing to hospitalize mentally ill defendants.
The trial, set to begin Wednesday in the U.S. Middle District Court in Harrisburg, follows a class-action lawsuit the ACLU filed in October that alleges that criminal defendants in Pennsylvania who are found incompetent to stand trial routinely wait months - and sometimes more than a year - in county prisons before the Department of Human Services transfers them to state-run psychiatric hospitals for treatment designed to restore them to competency.
The ACLU's lawsuit argues that those delays violate the constitutional rights of those defendants to due process and their rights to adequate mental health treatment under federal law. In recent years, federal courts have ruled that a defendant committed to a state hospital shouldn't wait longer than a week to be transferred.
"Everyone should care about this case not only because keeping heavily psychotic and incompetent people in jail is plainly unconstitutional, but also because it's inhumane," said Witold Walczak, legal director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania. "Our clients need treatment, not jail."
A second component of the ACLU's lawsuit alleges that defendants who are transferred to Pennsylvania state hospitals for competency restoration are trapped there for years after it becomes clear they can't be restored to competency.
The lawsuit argues that those patients should be transferred, as soon as possible, to less-restrictive units in the state hospital system or into appropriate settings in the community.
In a response filed by the Department of Human Services on Tuesday, the department contends that the claims of some or all of the plaintiffs named in the ACLU suit are moot. It notes that several of the plaintiffs who were waiting for state hospital beds when the ACLU filed its lawsuit in October have since been admitted. The state also argues that some or all of the plaintiffs lack legal standing to bring the case.
On Wednesday, the Department of Human Services declined to comment on the upcoming trial.
The issues raised by the ACLU's lawsuit were explored in August as part of PennLive's Patients to Prisoners series. PennLive found that defendants deemed incompetent to stand trial were waiting an average of 297 days for transfers to Norristown State Hospital, near Philadelphia.
Despite assurances by the Department of Human Services that it was working to address the problem, the numbers divulged in the ACLU's lawsuit in October, using more recent data, suggested that delays had grown worse.
According to the lawsuit, the last 25 defendants transferred from Philadelphia's prison system to Norristown State Hospital prior to Oct. 22 waited an average of 391 days - with one defendant waiting 589 days. It also found that two defendants had died in jail in recent years while waiting for beds.
In a phone interview on Tuesday, Walczak, the ACLU's legal director, said that his organization believed that those delays had continued to worsen since October.
"The problem has gotten really huge," Walczak said. "There are more people waiting to get treatment than they have got beds."