PIERRE (AP) – The state Supreme Court's chief justice used his legislative address Wednesday to pitch proposals meant to improve public safety and the treatment of mentally ill people in the criminal justice system.
Lawmakers should broaden the pool of people authorized to perform mental competency evaluations and expand infrastructure to offer a telehealth option for the assessments, Chief Justice David Gilbertson said in his State of the Judiciary address.
Gilbertson convened a task force after the Argus Leader newspaper reported that the backlog of mental competency evaluations of criminal suspects is taxing county budgets and raising concerns about the rights of defendants. The number of court orders for competency evaluations tripled from fiscal year 2013 to 2015, he said.
With the state's limited mental health resources, the increase forced people to sit in jail for months before they could be evaluated, Gilbertson wrote in the task force's report.
"Having these people languish in a county jail awaiting competency evaluations is not the right way to treat them," he told lawmakers Wednesday. "It also clogs the criminal justice system and costs a lot of additional tax dollars."
Gilbertson said he believes many of them are veterans who get in trouble because of post-traumatic stress disorder or attempts to self-medicate through substance abuse.
Getting arrested and kept in jail would be a traumatic experience for anyone, said Wendy Giebink, executive director of National Alliance on Mental Illness South Dakota. But, for someone living with a mental health disorder, the situation may be even more distressing and could cause treatment for their illness to get disrupted.
"Just imagine how frustrating it would be to be waiting in jail for something you have no control over and someone to determine whether or not you're competent to stand trial, Giebink said.
The task force's recommendations include starting a pilot mental health court in Pennington County and promoting the expansion of crisis services to help rural law enforcement. The group also suggested training authorities, prosecutors, judges and probation officers on the signs of mental illness and how to better handle it.
House Majority Leader Lee Qualm, a Republican, said that lawmakers would examine the issue, adding that there's no reason that people should be stuck waiting in jail. GOP Gov. Dennis Daugaard said Tuesday during his State of the State address that he will support the group's recommendations.
