ProPublica traces a Mississippi teenager's nearly four-year jail wait for a psychiatric evaluation and finds 102 others waiting
Tyler Haire was arrested at 16 over a stabbing in 2012 and a judge ordered a mental evaluation in April 2013. He spent 1,266 days in the Calhoun County jail before it happened, in 2016, without a psychiatrist's visit or any treatment, and later took a plea deal. The article reports that the state hospital's forensic unit at Whitfield had about 15 beds and took roughly two or three new defendants a month.
The state's own list showed that as of August 2017, 102 defendants were waiting in county jails for forensic evaluations, with individual waits of 1,249, 1,173 and 879 days. ProPublica reported that Mississippi may have the worst record of any state, and cited a 2014 survey in which 31 of 40 states said forensic wait times were worsening.
The story also describes a December 2015 Mississippi Supreme Court decision, Rowsey v. Mississippi, treating evaluation delay as good cause for missing the 270-day trial deadline. In 2019 the state committed to a much larger forensic unit.
Source: ‘What Are We Going to Do About Tyler?’ — ProPublica, by Sarah Smith
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