Special prosecutors want the head of the agency running the state’s mental hospital cited for contempt of court, an escalation of a dispute over how the state treats mentally ill criminal defendants.
The prosecutors say Marva Livingston Hammons, executive director of the Colorado Department of Human Services, as well as her agency and the Colorado Mental Health Institute in Pueblo have failed to obey judges’ orders that mentally incompetent defendants be admitted to the hospital.
In a brief filed Wednesday with Denver District Judge Martin Egelhoff, the special prosecutors say Hammons has a duty to care for troubled inmates, many of whom now spend months languishing in Colorado jails, often untreated.
Currently, between 77 and 81 inmates are awaiting admission to the Pueblo mental hospital, prosecutors said.
Hammons was not available to comment on the possibility of being fined for contempt. Others defended her, saying the hospital lacks room for all of the state’s criminal defendants deemed incompetent for trial.
“We believe the (Human Services) department has taken as many steps as we could possibly take to resolve the issue and continue to do so,” said department spokeswoman Liz McDonough.
Prosecutors already are seeking a contempt citation against Steve Schoenmakers, the hospital’s superintendent, but said Wednesday that Hammons should be cited as well because she allocates revenue within her department, which includes the hospital.
Egelhoff will consider the motions for contempt citations at a future hearing. No date has been set.
In the filing, special prosecutor Iris Eytan noted that other states have had similar problems. In Oregon, a judge found that incapacitated defendants were kept in Oregon jails for months before being treated at the state hospital.
The prosecutors say both Hammons and Schoenmakers must show why they’ve failed to admit and treat criminal defendants – and specifically why they failed to comply with Egelhoff’s order that Eugene Zuniga, an alleged bicycle thief, be admitted.
Zuniga, who was kept in the Denver County Jail three months after being found mentally incompetent because the hospital refused to take him, shows that the system is in a “current crisis” that is “spiraling out of control,” the motion said.
In her motion, Eytan included a transcript from a hearing in which Beverly Fulton, an assistant attorney general defending Schoenmakers, called the crisis “a terrible situation. It’s only getting worse.”
Fulton noted that in January 2005, 20 defendants were on the waiting list to get into the state hospital. But as of Oct. 19, there were 81, some of whom were waiting as long as five months to be admitted, she said.
“That is a terrible situation, but in terms of asking this man (Schoenmakers), this superintendent, to do anything more than he’s already done, it really is futile,” Fulton said in October.
Schoenmakers said in an interview Tuesday that in the past four years, the volume of referrals for competency evaluations by the hospital has doubled from about 418 to 815.
He said that because of a previous federal court settlement, there has to be a specific staff- to-patient ratio at the hospital that has resulted in the loss of available beds.
McDonough said Wednesday that the department hopes to reopen the beds by “aggressively pursuing” funding from the state legislature to get more hospital staff.
The legislature’s Joint Budget Committee on Tuesday balked at a request for $3 million to reopen a closed wing at the Pueblo facility.
In the meantime, McDonough said, the hospital has assigned a full-time coordinator to speed up and streamline admissions and discharges. It also has instituted weekly team meetings to examine progress and has diverted lower-risk criminal-defendant patients to the general adult psychiatric unit.
Staff writer Howard Pankratz can be reached at 303-954-1939 or hpankratz@denverpost.com.
