California Supreme Court lets 28-day admission deadline for incompetent defendants stand
California's highest court turned away the state's appeal in the case the ACLU filed in 2015, which means the 2019 trial-court order requiring admission of incompetent defendants to treatment within 28 days is now final. The state had lost at the trial court and again in the Court of Appeal before seeking review.
Courthouse News reports that the waitlist for transfers grew by more than 500 percent over eight years, from 262 defendants in July 2013 to 1,687 in February 2021, and that about 4,000 people found incompetent are held in county jails each year. An ACLU attorney said the state should lean on outpatient treatment, which he described as just as effective and much cheaper than inpatient care.
The denial ended the state's avenues for contesting the deadline and pushed it toward the diversion and community restoration programs that followed.
Source: California high court upholds faster mental health care transfers for unfit defendants — Courthouse News Service, by Nicholas Iovino
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