More than 200 people are currently waiting for one of 289 beds at Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center, Maryland’s only maximum-security forensic psychiatric hospital. These are people courts have rules are incompetent to stand trial or are not criminally responsible for a violent felony. While they wait, they sit in jail.
By law, the state has 10 business days from the time of a court’s order to transfer a defendant to a state hospital like Perkins. In the last year, courts have fined the state Health Department at least $1.5 million for violating that law. The Washington Post recently reported that on average, defendants wait two-and-a-half months for a bed, but some waits exceed six months.
State lawmakers pressed Maryland Health Secretary Laura Herrera Scott on the issue during a hearing before the Joint Committee on Fair Practices and State Personnel Oversight Wednesday.
“This problem seems to be ongoing, and it seems like there's no improvement in sight,” Sen. Clarence Lam, one of the committee’s co-chairs, said while asking Scott what she was doing to solve the problem.
Herrera Scott called the 10-day deadline “arbitrary.”
“We don't get patients in and out in 10 days. It's just much more complex than that,” she said. “And if you have evaluations and the number of people deemed incompetent is way more than the full capacity of the system, no matter what, I'm always going to have a waiting list.”
She also suggested some people would be better served in outpatient treatment than in a hospital setting, and some people are being misdiagnosed as incompetent.
“We have an evaluation. We say they're competent. The public defender says they want another opinion. … They get another evaluator that says they're incompetent. So the judge goes with the second,” she said. “In clinical care, if you have a different opinion, you go to a third clinician, right?”
But, she said, the courts are not seeking that third opinion.
In a statement, Maryland Public Defender Natasha Dartigue defended individuals’ rights to be evaluated.
“Individuals have an absolute right to understand the proceedings against them. When an accused person is incapable of participating in their legal defense, the case cannot move forward,” she said. “An evaluation by an independent doctor reduces the risk of error or bias in assessments.”
