Page 10
News
Street Roots • Feb. 23-March 1, 2018
was established B i a to -
sitais rights strategy la order
to respond to the problem that
we knew eostesh the crim inal-
» a lie n of people w ith mental
Illnesses, They were being
arrested largely feeoanse they
were not able to access c o » »
ally-based sew ices/"
BY A M A N D A WALDROUPE
funding. Our system was really deplorable.
A.W.: Originally, the m ental health court
STAFF WRITER
n 1993, Aaron Wynn suffered a psychotic
episode while he was in a grocery store
in Broward County, Florida. It was a
residual effect from the traumatic head
trauma he suffered when a car hit his
motorcycle in 1985. In the throes of the
episode, Wynn rushed out of the store and
collided with an 85-year-old woman. She fell
onto a concrete curb and died from her
injuries a day later.
He was convicted of first-degree murder.
He was 25 years old.
Wynn’s case showed in stark terms that
people with mental illnesses were
committing crimes due to the lack of
treatment, ultimately being criminalized and
imprisoned.
He became the impetus for creating a
new kind of court, one that didn’t penalize
people with mental health issues.
Four years later, in 1997, Broward County
opened the country’s first mental health
court on the recommendation of a task force
that studied the intersection of the county’s
criminal justice and mental health systems.
At the time it was considered revolutionary.
The person tapped to lead this new court
was Judge Ginger Lerner-Wren, who had
specialized in advocating for people with
serious mental illness against the backdrop
of institutionalization.
“I just happened to come to the judiciary
with a unique skill set that most judges or
lawyers did not have,” she said.
Two decades later, specialized courts,
such as mental health or drug courts, have
become commonplace in many parts of the
country, including Multnomah County. Such
courts work with people who suffer from
serious mental illnesses or drug addictions
and have committed low-level misdemeanors
and divert them out of the criminal justice
system and into treatment.
The intention is to reduce the number of
people in jails, help low-level offenders
access the proper medical treatment they
need and, hopefully, prevent future crimes
from occurring. Many have social workers,
nurses and other medical staff embedded
within the court to begin working directly
with offenders as soon as they enter the
court system.
Lerner-Wren has presided over the
Broward County Mental Health Court since
its creation. She thinks of the mental health
met d uring the lunch hour. Tell me what those
early days were like.
I
P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F T H E P A R S O N S C O M P A N Y IN C .
Sound judgment
As the judge in the nation’s first mental health
court, Ginger Lerner-Wren talks about a restorative
justice system that doesn’t criminalize mental illness
court as "not a trial court” but as a
“problem-solving treatment court.” It is a
subdivision of the criminal division and
works with people charged with
misdemeanors (with the exception of
driving under the influence or domestic
violence charges). The court is voluntary;
anyone - a family member, attorney or case
manager - can refer someone into it. A
clinician is embedded in the court.
Through her work, Lernef-Wren has
learned that “recovery is real,” that many
people who receive proper treatment will
likely never enter the criminal justice
system again. The court became the model
for the Mentally 111 Offender Treatment and
Crime Reduction Act, signed into law in
2000 by President Bill Clinton.
A memoir detailing her work on the
court, “Court of Refuge: Stories from the
Bench of America’s First Mental Health
Court,” was published last year, and she is
this year’s keynote speaker at the Oregon
Law and Mental Health Conference, which
takes place Saturday, March 2, in Portland.
Amanda Waldroupe: What was your
reaction when you were given the assignm ent
to become the first judge o f the county’s mental
health court?
Ginger Lerner-Wren: I just couldn’t
believe it. I remember the chief judge
calling me and simply congratulating me on
becoming the new mental health court
judge, and then asking me how long did I
think I needed to get started. I remember
thinking to myself, you know, this is a pretty
conservative judge. I really didn’t want him
to change his mind. I responded to him, if I
could have 10 days.
I felt that there was sense of urgency
because of what our community was
experiencing at the time. Florida, even to
this day, depending on the data you look at,
is 49th or 50th in funding for mental health
in the United States. We are literally at the
bottom rung in terms of the mental health
G.L.W.: We held court three days a week.
The early days were just extraordinary. We
never really thought for a second that
perhaps what we were doing had not been
done before. Nor did we know for certain
that it would be effective. All these systems
were so siloed. The mental health system
was completely independent from the
criminal justice system. The work to really
integrate these systems and somehow get
all these different agencies, organizations
within the sheriff’s office, organizations
within the community, to realign their
service models in order to establish a
diversionary system that would move people
out of a jail system into a local hospital...
was, really, I thought, almost miraculous.
I viewed the court in one sense as a court
of conscious. We were not going to blindly
jail people with serious mental health
illnesses and other types of cognitive
disorders. We just never thought we had
crossed some kind of tipping point.
A.W.: Tell me more about what you were
doing an d how you were doing it - how
mental health courts work very closely with the
hospital system, with the m ental health system
to get people the care they need.
G.L.W.: It was established as a human
rights strategy in order to respond to the
problem that we knew existed: the
criminalization of people with mental
illnesses. They were being arrested largely
because they were not able to access
community-based services. This court was
established to intercept individuals who
really needed mental health care but ended
up in the wrong systems of care as swiftly as
we could. In that regard, every design
feature of the court is really guided by
certain values that the court holds. Dignity
is a paramount, public safety is a paramount.
It s voluntary, and applies the law-reform
science of therapeutic justice, which
provides for a court process that is really
intending to be restorative.
A.W.: We often think o f the justice system as
black an d white - that someone is gu ilty or not
See JUDGMENT, page 11