Mental Illness is a public health issue with which California would rather not deal. Here a Third District panel nixes a court-created fix designed to avoid dealing with the problem.
Mr. Quiroz is charged with assault with a deadly weapon resulting in great bodily injury. He also has at least two prior strikes. March 2007, the trial court finds Quiroz incompetent to stand trial, suspends criminal proceedings, and sends him to a state mental hospital. December 2010, Quiroz returns to court with the hospital's final report that Quiroz is still incompetent to stand trial, is unlikely to regain competence, and should be the subject of a conservatorship.
The trial court orders the County to file conservatorship proceedings, which the County refuses to do, saying Quiroz is not currently dangerous. The prosecution asks the court to hold a new competency hearing, which the court does, despite no statutory authority to do so.
After this hearing (the opinion does not state what evidence was received), viola! the court finds Quiorz is now competent. Problem solved. Quiroz pleads guilty in return for a sentence of ten years inprisonment. The County and trial court may now breathe a sigh of relief and pass the buck to the Department of Corrections.
And they would have gotten away from it had it not been for those three meddling justices in the Third District.
The opinion is linear and there is little within it to dispute. Incompetency proceedings are creatures of statute and such creatures are strictly construed. The statute enumerates when competency hearings may be held; when a court doubts a defendant may be incompetent, after commitment to a state hospital for 18 months, and when a state hospital certifies a previously incompetent defendant has regained his competency. Since Quiroz's situation does not fit within any of these, the court had no jurisdiction to hold a competency hearing. The trial court's legal options were to order a conservatorship be filed, dismiss the charges and release Quiroz, or some other proceeding authorized by the conservatorship statutes.
Situations akin to Quiroz's are not that rare The reason is that California has no properly funded, comprehensive scheme to deal with mentally ill folks who break the law. Those like Quiroz have been determined by duly qualified psychiatrists, psychiatric nurses, and social workers, to suffer from a mental defect from which they are not likely to recover. They cannot, Constitutionally, be locked up for their deeds of misdoing. But many of them are not fit to be released, without assistance and supervision, into the community.
So the option is a conservatorship, which is funded either by the County or the State, depending upon the type of conservatorship. For people requiring extensive care or a secure facility, this can be very expensive. Since most indigent, incompetent, criminal defendants have little or no resources, these conservatorships become very expensive for a County. County officials are then reticent to conserve these people. Exhibit A, after the trial court ordered the County to initiate conservatorship proceedings for Quiroz, the County balked, claiming Quiroz was not a danger to others. Do you believe this? A mentally incompetent man with a history of arson who is now alleged to have injured someone by assaulting them with a deadly weapon is not currently a danger to others?
In this situation, a trial judge may be loathe to force the matter with the County. California judges are elected after all, and picking a fight with the County brass by ordering them to embark on a course of action that may force the taxpayers to pay millions of dollars to humanely house a "criminal" may not be the best career move. This is only slightly better than the alternative legal option of just releasing the mentally ill person. Imagine running for judicial reelection as the judge who released a mentally incompetent prisoner with Quiroz's record from custody should Quiroz go on to commit another violent crime.
So I can see why a judge may be motivated to create another option. I would be very interested to read the transcript from the competency hearing. After two findings of incompetency and three unsuccessful years in a psychiatric hospital program designed to restore him to competency, qualified psychiatrists opined Quiroz was unlikely to regain his competence. Something then overcame that evidence and prompted the trial judge to substitute his own judgement for that of the psychiatrists. I wonder what it was.
The solution is simple, but expensive and unpopular. California needs a properly funded, comprehensive scheme designed to protect the public and make sure that mentally ill persons are treated humanely.
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