Dick Van Dyke’s birthday was Saturday and his oldest acquaintance died the next day.
That IS a weird coincidence!
My brother is a drug addict with mental health issues; the kind that causes delusions. This very much would describe him:
He has been in and out of jail for his entire adult life. It’s very difficult to avoid prison for serious crimes. My brother has never killed anyone, but has a mixture of violent offenses, drug offenses, and property crimes.
My sense is that it’s a bit more nuanced than that:
An insanity defense is used in less than 1% of cases. Of those cases it is argued successfully a small percentage of the time. The bar for that defense is very high in every state.
In California, even at his first appearance for an arraignment, his own lawyer can declare doubts about his competence to cooperate with counsel in a meaningful defense. At that point, the judge will usually appoint someone – or multiple someones – to evaluate him for such a determination. If the report comes back that he is unable to cooperate in his own defense, he will be indefinitely confined to a facility until he is restored to competence. There will be regular review hearings by the court to keep track of that.
Once it’s determined he is restored to sanity – if ever – he will return to court to resume proceedings. At that point, he’ll enter a plea and go through the regular process: Pretrial hearings, preliminary hearing, motions, etc. At any time during this process, if his lawyer again feels he has slipped out of competence, back to the mental facility he will go and repeat the process above.
If he remains competent to cooperate with counsel in his defense, he can enter a dual plea: Not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity. He will be tried like any other defendant, but the jury has a choice between those two options. If found straight up guilty, he’ll go to a regular prison. If found NGI, he will go to a mental institution until restored to sanity. Probably Atascadero State Hospital.
As noted by others, NGI is a high bar. I frankly doubt he’s going to get past the first hurdle of being competent to cooperate in his own defense with counsel. The result is much the same as an NGI determination by a jury.
It is a horrible, sad story with an unspeakable outcome. Unfortunately, not as uncommon as we may wish to believe.
IANAL.
You mean Fred’s lad?
I forgot what thread this is. No place for jokes, I apologize.
A guy I grew up with stabbed his father to death. He was a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, with a history of violent behavior. I didn’t hang out with him much after junior high due to the way he treated people around him, and I can’t say I was really surprised. He tried to get in touch with me, but my parents never gave him my contact info. He was committed to a mental institution, where he died of cancer a few years ago.
It didn’t take long for Nick to get a high-power lawyer.
Is he going to sing, Don’t Rock the Jukebox?
I’m sure they’ll offer him meds to address whatever pharmacologically treatable psychiatric conditions they find. They’re unlikely to be medicating him without his consent unless they have a court order to do so or unless he’s suddenly acutely a danger to himself or others.
In my 20+ years of corrections medicine, I only medicated a patient once without patient consent. The patient was on dialysis and trying to rip out the dialysis lines from himself and other patients on the dialysis unit. He also had hepatitis C, a blood borne pathogen. Definitely an acute threat to himself and others
Or he didn’t realize that what he was doing was wrong. So, for example, the person thought that people would re-spawn like in a video game.
Consciousness of guilt is a way to overcome this claim. Did he run away? Try to hide evidence? Then he knew he did something wrong.
That’s not something that is routinely done. He would have to be deemed incompetent before any effort to alter his mental state was considered. Jail inmates awaiting trial are not, as a matter of course, given drugs.
“Michael” to his wife (and that motivated me to start introducing myself as Michael instead of Mike and to state it as my preference).
I also remember Reiner as Sheldn Stimler on the Odd Couple, appearing as Myrna’s boyfriend. A typo resulted in the ‘O’ being omitted from his birth certificate.
What a damn tragedy.
Interesting, in the ER, I’ve medicated people without their consent many times. I will also note that pts from the hospital for the criminally insane often do not have the right to refuse psych meds even in their routine situation.
How many of those had super expensive and highly competent attorneys that could sue your institution into oblivion?
Well, in the ER, how would I know? But apparently, none.
Sheldn O’Stimler?
That’s certainly interesting, and seems on surface to contradict the US Supreme’s Washington V. Harper 1990 ruling on chemical control which posits medication in unwilling inmates if they pose a danger but maintains due process for their right to have a hearing before involuntary treatment absent clear and present danger. And that applied not just to the jails and prisons I worked in or with but also to the two criminal psychiatric confinement institutions I was involved with in my state. But this is now furthering even more the hijack of the topic, so I’ll leave it at that.
Well, one can be both Irish and Jewish for sure, laddie!