Prosecutors and a state agency have reached a settlement designed to get mentally ill criminal defendants out of local jails and into the state hospital for treatment.
Prosecutors Iris Eytan and Marcus Lock had asked Denver District Judge Martin Egelhoff to hold the superintendent of the state hospital and the executive director of the Colorado Department of Human Services in contempt for failing to treat the inmates.
But Wednesday, they told Egelhoff in court papers that a contempt trial scheduled for Feb. 26 wouldn’t be needed because a settlement had been reached in the dispute.
The state and the prosecutors will ask the judge to approve the settlement Feb. 22.
Eytan and Liz McDonough, spokeswoman for the Department of Human Services, declined to release details, pending the arrangement’s approval by the judge.
But Eytan said she was pleased at the results of about two months of mediation overseen by former Boulder District Judge Dan Hale.
“I think the state is going to fulfill its obligation,” Eytan said. “There are still some minor terms we are trying to work out, but I think the state … has made serious efforts in curing this problem.”
Specifically, the special prosecutors had charged that the state was violating the constitutional rights of two categories of inmates – those who had been found incompetent and those awaiting mental- health evaluations.
Late last year, they claimed that there were as many as 77 Colorado defendants, who were found incompetent to stand trial, awaiting admission to the state mental hospital. Many of the inmates had been in jails for months despite court orders saying they were to be moved to the hospital.
Colorado Attorney General John Suthers said he was pleased at the outcome. Suthers’ office represented Karen Beye, the new Human Services executive director, and Dr. John DeQuardo, the new superintendent of the hospital.
Suthers said the dispute appears to have been resolved “to everyone’s satisfaction, and a framework has been established to avoid future conflicts of this nature.”
“The Department of Human Services and our attorneys, with additional resources from the Joint Budget Committee, did an exceptional job of finding common ground in the dispute, while reducing the backlog for those in the mental-health system,” Suthers said.
McDonough said all sides worked hard to resolve the problem.
“There has been a tremendous effort put forth by all parties to come to a reasonable agreement on this,” she said.
Staff writer Howard Pankratz can be reached at 303-954-1939 or hpankratz@denverpost.com.
