Legal News

City Officials Commemorate Opening of Mental Health Court

By Brian Harris

By Amaris Elliott-Engel

The Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas commemorated the opening of a mental health court for mentally ill prisoners re-entering public life with a press conference Tuesday that pulled top officials from the city's executive, legislative and judicial branches together.

This press conference, however, won't be the last to mark a new court program that strives to supplement the punitive power of the court against defendants with treatment services for defendants' underlying problems that brought them into the criminal justice system, officials said.

Under Supreme Court Justice Seamus P. McCaffery's leadership, Philadelphia will likely follow closely on the heels of Allegheny County in creating a specialized court program for veterans coming into contact with the criminal justice system after struggling to return to civilian life after serving in the Iraq and Afghanistan war zones, McCaffery said.

A working group is also exploring the possibility of applying for a grant for an intermediate punishment drug treatment court in the Court of Common Pleas, Criminal Trial Division Supervising Judge Sheila Woods-Skipper said. This proposed court would expand Philadelphia Municipal Court's long-standing treatment court to Common Pleas-level cases involving felony drug offenses, the judge said.

And the work of the mental health court might expand beyond services just for ex-offenders with mental illness returning to society after serving city prison terms, Woods-Skipper said.

Woods-Skipper said cases involving defendants found incompetent for trial purposes will be pulled from other judges' lists and will be placed on her list, so that those cases can be examined more closely by the team of criminal justice partners involved in the mental health court in order to see if the cases can be resolved sooner.

McCaffery also said he envisions Philadelphia following a "sequential intercept model" in which crisis intervention teams will respond to instances of public disturbances involving people with mental illness so that those people are diverted from entering the criminal justice system in the first place.

District Attorney Lynne Abraham said 500 defendants with mental illness have been handled informally in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas and Philadelphia Municipal Court and not one is a recidivist.

There are 1,900 people in the city prison system who might qualify for the new mental health court, Abraham said.

"This new court is a shining example of what can happen when leaders of the courts, city administration, criminal justice-related agencies and the mental health community collaborate for the common good," said Lynn Marks of Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts, who attended the press conference. "We look forward to following its progress and the next programs that are already in the planning stages."

Full post as published by The Legal Intelligencer Blog on July 08, 2009 (boomark / email).