COLUMN ONE : Where the Mind Is on Trial : Competency Court is where the judicial and mental health systems intersect. It offers a window on the disturbing world of the mentally ill.

The woman in the wheelchair is telling the judge that she came to California “under contract to put the Earth back together.” She wears a hospital gown with a blue and white snowflake pattern. A leather belt is strapped around her ample belly and lashed to her wrists, preventing her from rising.

Hanging her head in her hand, her fingers running nervously through thick mousy brown curls, the woman laughs and fights tears. “This is ridiculous,” she says loudly. “They cannot do this by the rights I know of in America.”

The woman, named Rosalie, rode the bus to Los Angeles from North Carolina. At the time of this court hearing in early August, she is being held against her will in a psychiatric ward at County-USC Medical Center. She has been there for a week, since the police picked her up near Paramount Studios in Hollywood, where she went looking for the actor who plays the spaceship captain on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” This mission, she explains, was part of her contract.

Rosalie never found actor Patrick Stewart. Instead, the cops found Rosalie--lying on the sidewalk, wallowing in her own feces, her legs red and blistered from days of exposure to the hot summer sun. Now, the County-USC doctors say she is mentally ill. They want to keep her for two weeks, as permitted by law. She wants only to go home.

Which is what brought Rosalie to Department 95 of the Los Angeles County Superior Court, Judge Harold E. Shabo presiding.

Department 95, known colloquially as “Competency Court,” is where the county’s court and mental health systems intersect. It is the only county court--and one of the few in the nation--that deals exclusively in mental health issues, wrapping criminal and civil cases into a single courtroom setting. As such, it provides a unique and compelling window into the world of the mentally ill.

Here, Shabo passes judgment on such matters as whether criminal defendants are competent to stand trial, whether people found not guilty by reason of insanity may be freed, whether psychiatric patients may be forced to take medicine over their objections and whether men and women like Rosalie may be committed to mental institutions.

More often than not, the road into Competency Court runs through a hospital’s doors. But over the past several years, as drastic cutbacks in the county’s mental health budget have resulted in outpatient clinic closures and an acute shortage of hospital beds, fewer people--only the sickest of the sick--are finding their way into the mental health system, and thus into Department 95. The rest are on the streets.

Countywide, the number of mental health patients detained on “14-day holds,” as was Rosalie, has declined steadily over the past several years. Meanwhile, the number of patients fighting those detentions in court has dropped--in part because of procedural changes, said court administrator Sandy Krauss, but also because there are not as many patients as there once were.

In some corners, the slide is especially dramatic. Not long ago, Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk provided Department 95 with a third of its clientele. In 1987, more than 2,000 people were placed on 14-day holds at Metropolitan, and 590 went to court seeking freedom. Last year, 711 were held, and just 109 waged legal battles to get out.

Meanwhile, the number of patients who are ordered by the court to remain in the hospital is higher than ever--an indicator that the cases are increasingly severe. In 1983, 76% of those contesting their hospitalization were committed. Today, the figure is 87%.

“With the collapse of the mental health system, the patients are sicker, they are more pathetic,” said David Fennell, a supervising psychiatrist at Olive View Medical Center who often testifies in Department 95. “You see a rapid revolving door with the patients, the same patients coming through time and time again. . . . The sad thing with the mentally ill is, they really don’t have anybody to lobby for them. They suffer in silence.”

On any given day, dozens of them can be found in Department 95 and its companion court, Department 95-A. There, Commissioner David Ziskrout presides over conservatorships, in which the court may appoint a steward, usually a relative or the county’s public guardian office, to manage the affairs of a mentally disabled person.

Hearings are open to the public but sparsely attended. No one, it seems, comes here without a reason.

The people who fill the court’s case files are fascinating and sad and hungry for attention. Among them is Eddine, a gray-haired woman in her late 60s, clad in blue and red polyester, holding a chocolate chip cookie in one hand and a diet cola in the other. Eddine, a patient at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, has come to Department 95-A to fight her doctors’ plans to administer electric shock therapy--a treatment approved by her 87-year-old mother, who acts as her conservator.

“I’m a doctor,” Eddine declares, her eyes widening. “I’ve been practicing for a whole year. . . . Right now, I’m on the Westwood campus of UCLA. It’s a locked ward but it’s very beautiful. Last year I went in every conceivable mental facility. I had straitjackets, belts wrapped around me, all terrible things that they do to mental patients.

“I’m a doctor but I’ve been treated like a patient because they didn’t know I was a doctor. But I’ve got the secret documents. I’ve also become the Rose Queen of Pasadena. It’s the dream of every young girl. I had a part in the final ceremonies of the Olympics, a big bash, hordes of people. I’m very close to the Pope. The Pope was recovering and came to my house and got very good care, and I’m being married today. Today is Wednesday. . . . “

Like Eddine--who lost her bid to avoid the treatment--Eric is resisting his doctors’ demands. A paranoid schizophrenic who plays Rachmaninoff on the piano, he speaks to Judge Shabo in scholarly, even tones. He sits erect in the witness chair, clutching a small Bible bound in black leather as he implores the judge to release him from Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.

“I would like to describe my education,” Eric announces melodramatically, “and point out that I am a mature, 41-year-old man. I am an astronomer, an artist, a churchgoer, a linguist, a musician, a lover, a friend, a mathematician, a surfer, an outdoorsman and a son. In the hospital I am none of these things. . . . I am without friends and in a world of strangers, an antagonistic world where the doctors and lawyers, everyone is against me. . . . “

Later, after the judge has ruled that he must stay where he is, Eric retreats to the relative quiet of a brick-enclosed courtyard. Smoking a cigarette down to its nub, he waves off a visitor, then relents. His fingers twitch involuntarily as his feelings spill out. His blue eyes well up.

“You’re sad,” his visitor observes. Eric blinks. “I’m almost devoid of emotion,” he says.

Society often turns its head away from its Eddines and Erics and Rosalies. But within Competency Court, there is a small corps of lawyers--five deputy district attorneys, two lawyers with the county counsel’s office and nine county public defenders--who have immersed themselves in the lives of the mentally ill.

These attorneys are fluent in the language of mental health--bipolar manic disorder, electroconvulsive therapy, paranoid ideations. It is not uncommon to see the DSM-III--the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a standard reference text used by psychologists and psychiatrists--on their desks, side by side with law books.

In this respect, advocates for the mentally ill say, Department 95 is a model for other jurisdictions. But these same advocates note that there are pluses and minuses to having a centralized court that handles only mental health cases.

“The upside is that judges (and lawyers) develop expertise,” said Leonard Rubenstein, executive director of the Washington-based Mental Health Law Project. “The downside is that it reinforces the sense of difference” that drives a wedge between the mentally ill and the remainder of society.

Signs of this isolation are abundant in Department 95. In many ways, the court--like the people it serves--is a neglected stepchild, the backwater of Los Angeles County’s vast Superior Court system.

Its home is a converted pickle factory on the outskirts of downtown, in a neighborhood of auto body shops and warehouses on the wrong side of the railroad tracks that hug the Los Angeles River. Its quarters are cramped. Unlike other county courts, its files are not on computer. Shabo’s own personal computer is a treasured possession; he brought it with him from his old courtroom in Pasadena.

Old files are stored in a room just off the sheriff’s lockup, which means clerks and lawyers have to walk through the jail to get to them. The back entrance to the building is scarred with graffiti; the door was barred shut after a stabbing victim ran in from the street.

For judges, who usually do two-year tours in Department 95, getting sent to Competency Court is the equivalent of being shipped off to judicial Siberia. As soon as they get the hang of the work, they move on.

“It has the reputation of being the pits,” a judge who worked there several years ago once said. “The worst assignment in the whole district.”

The caseload is a thicket of trying questions: If a mentally ill transient testifies that he forages in garbage for his dinner and lives in a cardboard box under a freeway overpass, does that mean he is “gravely disabled” and cannot provide for adequate food and shelter? If an alcoholic has threatened to shoot her ex-husband between the eyes but does not own a gun, does that mean she is a danger to others?

There are legal criteria for settling such matters. But legal guidelines and expert testimony aside, the decisions are wrenching. Inevitably, they are affected by the gut reactions of the judge, who may spend no more than five or 10 minutes talking to the person whose future he or she is about to decide.

Shabo dispenses justice with a heavy dose of psychology. The 51-year-old jurist can frequently be heard counseling patients to seek treatment for drug abuse, to take their medication, to do whatever will help them conquer their demons.

“Almost every case we deal with is a human tragedy,” Shabo said. “It takes a terrible toll--at the end of the day, hearing these cases will leave you really down. But I try to convert that depressed energy into something that will help people.”

Others convert it into a dark humor that seems to help them cope.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Aaron Singer is a 46-year-old congo drum player who became a lawyer to support his musical career. One morning, as court is about to go into session, he breaks into a little Christmas ditty to the tune of “Jingle Bells”: “Lithium, lithium, lithium todaaaaay. Yesterday, I forgot. Tomorrow, who can saaaaay? Lithium, lithium. . . . “

But in his next breath, the prosecutor sounds troubled: “There are a lot of sad cases. Sometimes, I do my own theorizing on why they’re crazy. Let’s say you had a poor childhood, and you just slipped into this imaginary world and you never came out. That’s my theory.”

Of all the mental health matters that come through Competency Court, the most vexing are the “NGI extensions.” At issue is whether criminals found not guilty by reason of insanity should be sentenced to additional hospital time or released.

Unlike other prisoners, NGI defendants do not automatically go free when their time is up. Instead, if the court finds that they are mentally ill and dangerous to others, their hospital stays may be extended two years. The extensions can be renewed indefinitely.

Releasing these people is delicate business; nobody wants to be responsible for putting a potentially violent criminal back on the streets. Consider the events during a recent hearing before Shabo:

A 34-year-old woman named Peggy Sue threw a knife at a cop, was found not guilty by reason of insanity and sent to Patton State Hospital for five years. Twice, her time had been extended. Now, the Patton doctors were asking for a third renewal. Sue, their reports said, was a threat to society.

A court-appointed psychiatrist strongly disagreed. Dr. Kaushal Sharma declared from the witness stand that Sue was neither mentally ill nor a danger. Not only that, Sharma said angrily, the Patton staff admitted to him that they did not believe the woman was dangerous.

“I asked them: ‘Why don’t you write down what you believe?’ ” the doctor testified. “They said they felt it was hospital policy. . . . They felt they could not take the risk of her getting out and doing something and them getting their name in the newspaper.”

If the staff at Patton was weak-kneed, so too was the district attorney’s office. Although prosecutors knew of Sharma’s findings, they pressed forward with Patton’s request to keep the woman institutionalized--a move that drew a sharp rebuke from Shabo, who complained that valuable court time had been wasted and ordered the woman released.

Always, there is a fear that those who are released from Department 95 will be back. Patients promise to take their medication and are released from the hospital. Before long, the pills run out, or the patient decides he no longer needs them, and voices once again fill his head. Then, another hospital commitment, and another trip to Competency Court.

“Sometimes,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Howard Kelner sighs, “we will see people coming two and three times a month through here.”

Others have a tougher time getting out. Rosalie, for one, remains in County-USC. Her 14-day hold has expired, and her doctors say they want to keep her for another 30 days. She intends to go back to Department 95 and continue her fight. But she no longer wants to go back to her trailer--”double wide, four bedrooms, two baths”--in North Carolina.

“I have a job here,” she declares. “I’m under contract for the fall season--commercials for Paramount. It starts two weeks from now. There’s no point in going back; my job is here and I really need the money. I want out. . . . “