There was much more to it than trying to get a check for $5,588 – and 56 cents.
Mental illness provided the proverbial “elephant in the room” last week at a hearing in Putnam County Superior Court.
Mental health issues have been no strangers to national stories in the past few years, being cited as an element in several headline-making attacks – the guy in Maine who shot 18 people, for example; the grocery store shootings in Buffalo, NY; or the hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband in San Francisco, among too many others.
While a criminal act was part of the background for last week’s hearing here, the issues in the hearing homed in on society’s duties and mechanisms for dealing with mental health when it slides over into criminal acts.
The hearing touched on several broad themes – the authority of the courts, the aroma of statehouse politics, the duties and responsibilities of various local and state officials, and, of course, money.
Into this mix can be added an unhappy judge.
Even the legal subject of the hearing was unusual – a local government official suing a department head in state government for “contempt.”
The local government official was Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills. The head of the state department was Kevin Tanner of the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities.
While Sills said there were more costs involved, he was asking the state to reimburse the county for $5,588 (and 56 cents) worth of medications and treatments for a prisoner who should have been in state custody.
The prisoner was a Putnam County woman who was arrested on robbery charges in August 2022. She has remained in the county jail ever since, for 16 months. She was well-known to local law enforcement officers over the years, with her first brush with the law coming 27 years ago.
By March of this year, she had finally been evaluated to see if she was competent to stand trial on the robbery charge. State evaluators said she was.
In a bench trial in June before Judge Brenda Trammell, both Sills and the Ocmulgee Circuit’s chief assistant public defender, Kevin Stromberg, recommended the woman be judged incompetent and be taken in by the Department of Behavioral Health/Developmental Disabilities. Looking at the totality of her record and the recommendations, Trammell agreed.
Time passed. Nothing happened.
“They just ignored it (the judge’s order),” Sills said. “It happens all over the state … but they are the first to tell us we have to comply with their law … they should have to abide by the law the way I have to.”
Trammell set a show-cause hearing for Sept. 7 this year, but it was postponed because of a death in Tanner’s family, among other reasons.
With all the delays and excuses, Trammell was losing her patience, and in giving her order at the end of last week’s hearing, she addressed Tanner at length.
One observer characterized that ending as “animated.” Sills was a little more blunt.
“She chewed him out,” he said. “In my years I have been chewed out by a judge, but I never had it that bad.”
On Tanner’s part, he said his agency had shortages in both patient beds and staff. The agency oversees facilities with a total of 300 beds in a state with a census-estimated 2020 population of 10,711,988.
Only a small portion of the beds are reserved for those with criminal acts, and he said the agency had begun a program to pay Chatham and Cobb counties to house 14 such prisoner-patients in their jails.
At one time, the state asylum south of Milledgeville housed about 13,000 inmates, which set it among the largest, if not the largest, mental institution in the world. (One building, the Binion, was set aside for the criminally insane.)
However, with the asylum having a reputation for “warehousing,” change came in the 1970s with the Carter administration’s shift to “community-based” treatments.
Now 40 years later, Baldwin County Commissioner Henry Craig is president of the Association County Commissioners of Georgia (ACCG) and is urging the state’s counties to petition the General Assembly to do something about the state’s mental health system.
“I don’t advocate ‘warehousing,’” Craig told Putnam County commissioners two weeks ago. “But what we have now isn’t working.”