National report calls for states to rethink competency evaluation and restoration
The Council of State Governments Justice Center's "Just and Well" report synthesized state-level data and interviews to document how competency evaluation and restoration systems are overwhelmed nationwide, offering recommendations that several states — including Colorado and Washington — have since drawn on in their own legislative overhauls.
A companion academic paper published the following year in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law expanded on the report's data-quality findings, arguing that inconsistent state-by-state data collection remains a major obstacle to tracking the crisis nationally.
Source: Just and Well: Rethinking How States Approach Competency to Stand Trial — CSG Justice Center, by Hallie Fader-Towe and Ethan Kelly
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