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U.S. District Judge Michael Mosman ruled June 5 that Oregon State Hospital’s accelerated early release timelines may not be extended when patients refuse treatment.
Mosman had ordered the timelines last year as part of a compromise between the state health authority and advocates seeking to minimize the time mentally ill criminal defendants must wait in jail for a bed to come available at the beleaguered state psychiatric institution.
Several local judges have pressed the issue in recent months, demanding the state psychiatric hospital hold patients beyond the one-year limit if they refuse to take their medication, designed to restore them to competency so they can face trial. (A Washington County judge ruled last week that a woman accused of murder should be kept at the hospital for almost another year because the hospital had not, until recently, been involuntarily medicating her.)
But in his Monday ruling, Mosman refused to budge, noting that state statute says the timelines are “measured from the defendant’s initial custody date.”
Attorneys for Metropolitan Public Defender and Disability Rights Oregon, which have advocated for the early releases to shorten a lengthening waitlist at the hospital, slammed the local judges’ decisions in a memorandum filed June 2, arguing that doctors’ treatment decisions shouldn’t affect the length of patients’ stays.
“Allowing judges to second-guess those decisions, and extend the duration of a patient’s confinement whenever they deem the choices to be wrong, threatens to undermine the entire purpose of this Court’s remedial order as well as established legal jurisprudence,” they wrote.