COVID-19 leaves few safe options for defendants found incompetent to stand trial
An early-pandemic piece from The Marshall Project described how courts, jails, and state psychiatric hospitals nationwide scrambled as COVID-19 made it unsafe to move incompetent defendants into congregate forensic settings, stranding many of them in jail without treatment.
The national framing set the stage for the state-specific COVID admission suspensions that followed later that year and into 2022 in Oregon, Washington, and California, each covered separately elsewhere in this backfill.
Source: For Mentally Ill Defendants, Coronavirus Means Few Safe Options — The Marshall Project, by Christie Thompson
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