Starting from the middle of my internship (approximately week 6) I started seeing a case over and over and over. I read it once, forgot the name, then the next week I would see it sitting in our neat pile on the desk again. It was a thick case, clearly handled many times by the abundance of writing on the front and the many creases resulting from handing the file to people and transporting it back and forth from the courthouse to the public defender’s office.

 

The client in question was a 30-year-old black man who was being charged with felony sexual assault with penetration, a very disturbing thing to have to read. He was in a group home for mentally unstable individuals at the time of the alleged crime, and he had been eyeing and making inappropriate gestures and remarks to a staff member who cleaned the rooms.

 

One day, when she went to his room and believed he was gone (she began only cleaning the room when he was away due to her uncomfortableness), she started cleaning the bathroom. A slight noise startled her and she turned around to see him standing behind her, watching her. She tried making small talk but instead he ran up behind her and forcefully hugged her, ultimately throwing her into the bathtub and raping her.

 

I was horrified. Disgusting, I thought to myself. When we met with the client I immediately noted something was off. He couldn’t complete a sentence and could barely keep up with what we were saying to him; an individual that was absolutely not competent to stand trial.

 

For those who don’t know, competency is a here and now question. This often becomes confused with not guilty by reason of insanity. Here is the difference: if you were “legally insane” at the time the crime occurred, in that moment, then you are not guilty. If in court, after a crime was committed, you are unable to assist your attorney or understand the crime you have been charged with and the repercussions, you are not competent to stand trial.

 

This individual was arguably both, however proving competency (since it is something that can be measured now at this point in time), is easier to prove in order to have a case dismissed. This individual was found incompetent, and, with charges dismissed, he was waiting to be involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital. He needed to be there, and week after week I learned more about his condition.

 

Our client should never have been allowed to stay in that group home for functioning individuals with mental health concerns; the judge, prosecutor, and my attorney all agreed on that. More importantly, he desperately needed to be admitted to a hospital, as his condition deteriorated daily. I learned that he had suffered from a severe brain injury years ago, and as a result in physically unable to control sexual impulses in any situation. He had been charged with sexual assault in the past and was known by the prosecutors, defenders, and judges. The prosecution, who usually is strict in their want to put criminals away, desperately pleaded with the judge to get this individual into the hospital.

 

Every single day, our client had called my attorney, asking if there was finally an open bed in the hospital. He had gotten lost in the prison system from his waiting weeks and weeks on end, during one court date we literally did not know where he was, being told that he had been transported to the psychiatric hospital by the jail, and, after 30 minutes of phone calls and searching (the jail is physically underneath the courtroom that we were in at the time), we found him in the jail.

 

He was a criminal by all definitions, one who had committed multiple crimes in a habitual felonious way (multiple felonies of the same type), but was it by free will? Absolutely not. He could not physically control the urge to commit this crime, and was continually denied access to a facility in which he could receive help, even when he desperately asked for it.

 

Every day in the office I would hear his call, the emotionless tone at which the prison phone system says “an inmate from the Washtenaw County Jail is attempting to call you, press 1 to pick up this call.” Every day in the office I would hear the same conversation, slowly, since communication with him was extremely difficult due to his impairment. You could almost hear the wheels turning in his head as he tried to understand that, for another day, he had to be housed in the jail. The sad sigh at the end of the phone call signaled how being found incompetent to stand trial did not mean that you were given the opportunity to receive help; but that you would be put on a wait list for the small number of beds allotted for “criminals” in those institutions.