Death of a jailed man awaiting a hospital bed puts Virginia's forensic waits in focus
Jamycheal Mitchell was arrested in April 2015 over roughly $5 of snacks. A judge sent him to Eastern State Hospital to have his competency restored, but he was still at Hampton Roads Regional Jail when he died on August 19, about 90 days after the order. The Virginian-Pilot used his death to look at how Virginia handles defendants who are ordered into state hospital care.
The paper reported that forensic commitments sit at the back of the queue for the state's 1,491 hospital beds, behind civil commitments, temporary detention orders and insanity acquittees, so jails are left holding defendants who are supposed to be in treatment. Patients can also cycle between the hospital and the jail, and beds are tied up when people cannot be discharged for lack of community services. The state's interim behavioral health commissioner said he did not want people waiting in jail after a restoration order, while a Norfolk sheriff described local jails as de facto mental hospitals.
The piece is an early, detailed account of the competency-restoration bottleneck in Virginia and of the case that later pushed lawmakers to impose faster admission timelines.
Source: Jamycheal Mitchell’s death exposes problems with how state deals with mentally ill inmates — The Virginian-Pilot, by Gary Harki
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