This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
For a federal judge, the question of whether Utah is violating the constitutional rights of mentally ill jail inmates appeared on Thursday to come down to this: Are competent professionals determining that such inmates are better off being held in the county jails than they would be if they were treated at the state hospital?
U.S. District Judge Robert Shelby posed the question at the end of a three-hour hearing Thursday over whether to allow a lawsuit to go forward as a class-action case involving dozens of jail inmates or if it just proceeds with the current three who are part of the complaint filed last year.
Shelby said he hoped to issue a ruling soon.
At stake is whether the inmates' constitutional rights were violated by a lack of timely treatment for those who were declared incompetent to stand trial. As a result of the lawsuit, the state could be forced to pour into the system more money to ensure that inmates are not sitting in jail for months without treatment and without a trial on the charges that led to their arrests.
Shelby is presiding over the lawsuit brought last year by the Disability Law Center, which said the waiting list to get into the State Hospital for treatment had doubled every year for the prior three years, and that inmates were sometimes kept for months in solitary confinement for minor crimes.
In April, the judge turned back the state's attempt to have the lawsuit dismissed.
Alan Sullivan, an attorney representing the Disability Law Center, told Shelby that the launch of a new outreach program in which inmates deemed incompetent are being evaluated by social workers in the jail does not mean they are getting treatment.
"The outreach the outreach program doesn't even pretend to be a treatment program," Sullivan said. "It's a monitoring program."
But Parker Douglas, chief federal deputy for the Utah attorney general's office, said jail inmates' mental-health needs are being met adequately through the program.
"They claim that all people do in jail is sit there," he said, "and that's just not true."
Douglas suggested that the ruling needed to take into consideration the state's budgetary situation alongside other factors.
That prompted Shelby to ask, "Does the Constitution yield to the Legislature's budgetary considerations?"
He suggested that the state also had the option of releasing inmates who weren't getting timely and adequate treatment.