At the Texas Tribune, Brandi Grissom has an item (published a week ago on their Texas Weekly subscription site) about a pair of bills addressing competency restoration in county jails, legislation that Grits had discussed the day before. One minor quibble: Grissom described Rep. Zerwas' and Sen. Duncan's bills as "companions" (i.e., identical bills filed in both chambers), but that's not quite accurate. They're not listed as companions on the capitol website. As I read it, Duncan's bill creates a two-county pilot, while Zerwas' legislation sets a more generalized rule allowing counties to perform competency restoration in jail (through the local mental health authority or a provider they help select) instead of at the state hospital.
Normally I'd say performing mental health treatment in jails instead of hospitals is a bad idea. But because incompetent defendants, including those only charged with misdemeanors, are spending many months in jail on waiting lists for state hospital beds to open up, providing mental health services while in lockup amounts to the least bad option. As Grits wrote last week, both bills are band-aids and by no means a substitute for an adequately funded community mental health system. Clearly the Texas Legislature won't provide adequate funding on their own (not in this session's budget, anyway), so the question becomes whether courts will at some point force them to spend more money treating incompetent, mentally ill defendants awaiting trial. The state lost the first round in the courts and pending litigation on the subject will likely be resolved, one way or the other, by the time the Lege meets again in 2015.
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