W***n
发帖数: 11530 | 1 By Julia Dahl CBS News September 4, 2015, 3:02 PM
Arrested for allegedly stealing $5 of food, mentally ill Virginia man dies
in jail
PORTSMOUTH, Va. -- At a little after midnight on April 22, Jamycheal
Mitchell was arrested for allegedly stealing $5.05 worth of junk food - a
Snickers, a Zebra cake and a 2-liter bottle of Mountain Dew, to be exact -
from a 7-11 store in Eastern Virginia.
Mitchell, who was two days past his 24th birthday, was severely mentally ill
, having been diagnosed years earlier with paranoid schizophrenia. He was
ordered held without bail on misdemeanor charges of theft and trespassing (
he had been banned from the 7-11 previously) and in May a judge ordered that
he receive treatment at Eastern State Hospital in Williamsburg, Va., about
55 miles away.
But Mitchell never left jail.
For three months, jail officials say no beds were available at the state
mental health facility, and on Aug. 19, jail personnel found him
unresponsive in his cell. His family told CBS affiliate WTKR that he had
lost weight while incarcerated and was "unrecognizable." The medical
examiner has yet to determine the cause of his death, but jail officials
reportedly say he had no signs of assault or injury on his body.
Mitchell's death is an example of the collision of two major problems
plaguing our criminal justice system today: lack of adequate treatment for
the thousands of mentally ill inmates, and a bail bond system that some call
unduly punitive and ineffective.
Until the 1990s, when "tough on crime" policies came into vogue, it was
typically only people accused of serious felonies who were held without bail
, according to Cherise Burdeen, the executive director of the Pretrial
Justice Institute, a non-profit organization that works to promote fair and
effective pretrial practices. But in the past few decades that has changed,
and Burdeen says that many more people - like Sandra Bland and Kalief
Browder - are being detained for long periods of time on relatively minor
offenses and without having been convicted of anything.
As Mitchell's death reveals, the change is not without consequences.
"Wielding this tool has a very big impact on people who are low and medium
risk," Burdeen told 48 Hours Crimesider. In fact, she says, research shows
that denying bail or putting a very high price on freedom, actually
increases the likelihood that low-level offenders will re-offend.
The impact is particularly great, says Burdeen, on people with mental health
issues, like Mitchell. In jail, "their condition gets worse."
Professor Robert Morris, a criminologist who researches bail and bond issues
at the University of Texas at Dallas, says that judges and magistrates have
"a lot of discretion" in how they determine bail for a defendant, and that
there is "huge variation between jurisdictions."
In Virginia, bail or bond is determined, in part, by a pretrial risk
assessment that is supposed to help gauge a defendant's likelihood of
returning for trial and whether releasing them would pose a risk to public
safety. According to documents obtained by WTKR and shared with Crimesider,
a Portsmouth magistrate determined that Mitchell should be held without bail
, although what risk the alleged shoplifter posed remains unclear. Calls to
the office of the magistrate that determined Mitchell's bail were not
returned.
Morris called the lack of bail for a misdemeanor "peculiar," and wondered if
the magistrate that issued the no bail order had information about Mitchell
that hasn't been made public - perhaps that might have pointed to his
possibly being a danger to himself or others. If not, he said, "it's
outrageous."
Court documents show little in the way of a criminal record for Mitchell. He
was arrested for misdemeanor petty larceny in 2010, and a mental health
evaluation indicated he was "acutely psychotic" at the time of his
assessment and incompetent to stand trial.
Despite this history of mental illness, after his April 2015 arrest for
shoplifting, Mitchell was allowed to waive his right to have an attorney
represent him.
Still incarcerated a month later, Mitchell received another court-ordered
psychiatric evaluation and the doctor who evaluated him again deemed him
incompetent to stand trial. The doctor wrote that Mitchell "was not mentally
capable of participating in a sanity evaluation."
On May 21, Judge Morton Whitlow ordered that Mitchell be transferred from
Hampton Roads Regional Jail to Eastern State Hospital for mental health
treatment, but according to Lt. Col. Eugene Taylor, the Assistant
Superintendent of the jail, Eastern State said there were no beds available.
Days went by. Weeks, and then months. And still, no beds. According to a
spokesperson for the Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and
Developmental Services, the state of Virginia has 1,455 beds in state-run
hospitals like Eastern State to serve adults with mental illness - but only
385 of those are designated for people who are incarcerated, including those
deemed incompetent to stand trial, like Mitchell.
According to Lt. Col. Taylor, Mitchell was being medicated for his mental
illness and eating meals before his death. Taylor told Crimesider that as of
June, more than one-third of the inmates incarcerated in Hampton Roads were
receiving treatment for mental illness, a situation that puts a "tremendous
burden" on the staff. He said it was "not uncommon" for inmates to wait
days or weeks for a treatment bed to open up.
"There are things a treatment facility can do that we just can't," said
Taylor. And yet, he said, Hampton Roads has been called "the state's largest
mental health facility."
Virginia's mental health system has come under scrutiny before, most
recently in November 2013 when State Senator Creigh Deeds' son, Gus, stabbed
his father and then committed suicide after reportedly being denied mental
health treatment at a hospital because of lack of space. According to Mira
Signer, the executive director of Virginia's chapter of the National
Alliance on Mental Illness, in the aftermath of Deeds' death, the state
passed a law assuring that no one ordered by a judge to receive inpatient
mental health treatment - as Deeds' son had been - would be turned away.
However, she said, that law does not apply to people who are incarcerated. | a**t
发帖数: 3833 | 2 how is this post related Hillar? shabi.
ill
【在 W***n 的大作中提到】
: By Julia Dahl CBS News September 4, 2015, 3:02 PM
: Arrested for allegedly stealing $5 of food, mentally ill Virginia man dies
: in jail
: PORTSMOUTH, Va. -- At a little after midnight on April 22, Jamycheal
: Mitchell was arrested for allegedly stealing $5.05 worth of junk food - a
: Snickers, a Zebra cake and a 2-liter bottle of Mountain Dew, to be exact -
: from a 7-11 store in Eastern Virginia.
: Mitchell, who was two days past his 24th birthday, was severely mentally ill
: , having been diagnosed years earlier with paranoid schizophrenia. He was
: ordered held without bail on misdemeanor charges of theft and trespassing (
| T*********I
发帖数: 10729 | 3 像Michael Brown这样的横行无忌的明抢加油站的，难道不应该Arrest？
$5 of food，说的好像要饿死了，
去你家里拿 $5 food，你有没意见？该不该arrest？合法么？
而且 $5 of food，只是一次被抓。抢了没抓的时候多了去了。 | C****C
发帖数: 362 | 4 福利应该给适合的人。
现在的警民关系也不能说仅仅是trump所说的几个bad apples;主要责任在官员和媒体。
今天看一个议员在报纸上的评论，两句话就没一个字是实话。 大家都没一句实话的时
候就麻烦了。 |
|
