When the System Fails--the Violent Result

Few mental patients are dangerous, says Barbara Demming Lurie, a patients’ rights advocate for Los Angeles County. The ones that are, however, “make screaming headlines and become examples of the system’s failure,” she said.

Consider the case of James Wallace Lee.

Lee, a 33-year old chronic PCP user with a mental disorder, had been in and out of institutions since 17 and had a history of threats and attacks against his mother. In April, Lee was released from Camarillo State Hospital, about 60 miles north of Los Angeles. Within days, he was in Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk for setting fires in trash cans.

After a May trial in Department 95, a jury found that Lee was gravely disabled. That finding allowed the court to appoint the Los Angeles County public guardian’s office as his conservator and commit Lee involuntarily to Metropolitan for one year.

Wins Release

But Lee asked for a rehearing--his right under state law--and on Oct. 6, at a hearing in Department 95-A, a Metropolitan staff psychologist testified before Commissioner David Ziskrout that Lee was no longer gravely disabled. Ziskrout ordered Lee released.

Once out, Lee headed straight for his parents’ South-Central Los Angeles home. They refused to let him move in, so Lee checked into a nearby motel. Three days later, he went back to the house and stabbed his mother to death, said Detective Patrick Marshall of the Los Angeles Police Department’s southeast division.

Neighbors told police that Lee was covered with blood when he left the house. Police found him three days later in a Venice board and care home. Lee, who has been booked on suspicion of murder, is now undergoing evaluation at the psychiatric ward of Los Angeles County jail.

How could such a thing happen?

Family Opposed

Lee’s family says they didn’t want him released, and would have testified so had they known about the hearing. A Metropolitan spokesman said numerous attempts to contact the family were unsuccessful because the family’s phone number had been changed.

Moreover, the issue at Lee’s hearing was not whether he was dangerous, but only whether he could take care of himself, said David Guthman, head of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s psychiatric division.

Another option would have been to commit Lee for six months by invoking a little-used “danger to others” clause. To do so, the hospital would have had to show that Lee had engaged in recent dangerous activity, and some critics of the mental health law say that it is difficult to prove that someone has engaged in dangerous activity.

Guthman says that in 1985 only 16 patients were committed under the “danger to others” clause.

“It’s a horrible thing to say, but no one did anything wrong,” Sandy Krause, a Department 95 supervising counselor, says of the Lee case.

But Lee’s case gives ammunition to mental health law critics who say that the courts protect the civil rights of the mentally ill at the expense of society’s safety.