Spokane judge fines Eastern State Hospital for slow competency evaluations as jail waits stretch past a month
Reporting in The Spokesman-Review in March 2015 described how Spokane County Superior Court Judge Sam Cozza had found Eastern State Hospital in contempt in 11 cases since the previous December. Each finding carried a $200-per-day sanction for every day a defendant's evaluation ran past the schedule, and the paper put the total for those cases above $86,000. As of early March, 39 people jailed on felony charges were waiting for an evaluation at the hospital, and 31 of them had waited more than a week. One defendant waited 122 days for a completed evaluation.
The article tied the delays to staffing and money: Eastern State had six evaluators covering the 20 counties east of the Cascades, evaluation requests had risen about 30 percent between 2011 and 2014, and state salaries for evaluators lagged what the VA and private employers offered. A state attorney told the court that the department did not dispute the waits were unreasonable but objected that fines came out of the hospital's operating budget. The piece also noted a new state law, signed days earlier, setting a seven-day target and 14-day cap for in-jail evaluations, and a supplemental budget adding funds for hospital capacity.
The story is an early look at the county-level enforcement that preceded the federal contempt fines in the Trueblood litigation. A federal judge had already found the waits unconstitutional, and a trial to set acceptable limits was due to begin the following week.
Source: Eastern State Hospital sanctioned over delayed mental health evaluations — The Spokesman-Review, by Rachel Alexander
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