Offering frequent news and analysis from the majestic Evergreen State and beyond, The Cascadia Advocate is the Northwest Progressive Institute's unconventional perspective on world, national, and local politics.

Monday, April 27, 2009

Democrats don't deliver: ESB 5519 abandoned by the House

Here's another entry for the great bills that didn't turn into useful new laws file: Engrossed Senate Bill 5519, which would have decreased the unnecessary time that mentally ill persons charged with crime spend in jail, fell victim to the final cutoff of the 2009 legislative session. (I was going to blog about this earlier, but wanted to wait and see if any elements of the bill made it into the budget, which the Legislature was working on up until this weekend. More on that shortly).

ESB 5519 had the potential to save municipal governments a lot of money, because keeping people locked up isn't cheap. (If you don't believe me about the cost aspect, take a look at the fiscal note and see for yourself).

We'd like to applaud Senators James Hargrove, Debbie Regala and Val Stevens, who sponsored the bill in the Senate, where it ultimately passed (the vote ws forty four to one). Kudos also to Representative Mary Lou Dickerson (D-36th District) who pushed hard for the bill in the House.

If you're not familiar with ESB 5519, here's a bit of backstory to explain what the legislation was and why it was important.

ESB 5519 was a proposal that was thirty months in the making. It was crafted by a collection of stakeholders numbering greater than forty.

The product of their work was introduced by legislators in the form of Senate Bill 6311, which did not make it out of committee during last year's short session.

This year's more polished version, ESB 5519, appeared headed towards passage, but ran into trouble because some stakeholders either did not understand - or refused to try to understand - simple mathematics.

There was also a perception that this was a "Seattle thing" - in other words, that there was no statewide support for this much needed reform. Those of us working to get the bill to the governor felt as if we were offering a cool drink of water to a person dying of thirst in the desert, only to be rebuffed and rejected.

But let's back up a bit and look at this problem in greater detail. The following is a summation that describes the present situation and what ESB 5519 would have done to fix or alleviate it, in list style.
  1. All persons charged with a crime have the right to be mentally competent in order to stand trial.
  2. When competency is raised as an issue for a mentally ill defendant, the court orders a competency evaluation. The overwhelming majority of those evaluations occur either in local jails or in hospitals.
  3. Eastern State and Western State Hospitals are the two state psychiatric hospitals for adults who suffer from serious mental illness. Not surprisingly, hospital beds are scarce.
  4. A defendant who is committed to Eastern or Western for a competency evaluation is there for observation and diagnosis, not for treatment.
  5. The more beds that are used for competency evaluations, the fewer that are available for actual treatment.
  6. Because bed space is so scarce, there is a long waiting list for defendants to be admitted to the hospital for evaluation.
  7. A defendant will wait longer just to be transported to the hospital for a competency evaluation than he or she would wait in jail for the evaluation and hearing.
  8. In other words, a defendant who is committed to a state psychiatric hospital for a competency evaluation will stay in jail far longer than is necessary.
  9. Currently, the law contains no time frame in which an in jail evaluation is to be completed, though most are done within 14 days.
  10. Clearly a time frame is desirable. ESB 5519 would have set time limits - phased in to a final maximum time of sixteen days for in jail evaluations.
  11. The law sets describes the required contents of a competency evaluation. Some of those requirements were inefficient and unnecessary from the get-go; others have become so based on case law and the passage of time. Those inefficiencies were addressed in ESB 5519, without any diminution of public safety.
  12. There were other valuable provisions in the bill that would have sped up the process further, while still protecting public safety.
While ESB 5519 is dead for now, one its provisions (found in Section 110) did make its way into the budget. That language requires the Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) to track data about wait times for in-jail, in-hospital and community-based evaluations. It also requires DSHS to track data on the effectiveness of competency restoration treatment for those defendants who are mentally incompetent to stand trial.

That is good news.

Obtaining established data showing the benefits that could be reaped from a reincarnation of 5519 will go a long way toward making that a reality.

This is not the end of the road - at least as far as we at NPI are concerned. We will continue to work the issue with a goal of producing meaningful legislation to address this issue in 2010 and possibly 2011 if necessary.

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