Prosecuting a ‘6-Year-Old’

Riverside County prosecutors are struggling to pin a yearlong prison sentence on Ann Marie Degree, a brain-damaged Orange County woman who last month allegedly stole a roll of Life Savers from a hospital gift shop and then scratched a sheriff’s deputy who tried to retrieve the candy.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard Bentley says he is serious about holding all adults accountable for their actions, and he claims to be incensed by courts that let defendants avoid personal responsibility by asserting some vague mental condition. But Bentley’s suggestion that Degree is such a person is unreasonable and unfair. Since suffering a stroke at 18, the 38-year-woman has had the mental capacity of a 6-year-old. Under a public conservatorship, she has spent nearly all her adult life in a mental hospital. At the time of the alleged crime, she was in a medical hospital for diabetes treatment.

Imprisoning Degree would burden taxpayers, expose her to trauma and exacerbate her antisocial tendencies instead of restraining them. Her case is symptomatic of the many failures of the criminal justice system in dealing with the severely mentally handicapped--failures that have ended in the shooting deaths of homeless mentally ill people in Los Angeles and New York in the last year.

Degree is to face felony assault charges at a preliminary hearing June 6. Her attorney and prosecutors are expected to debate the extent to which she should be held criminally liable, but the focus should be on how to ensure that she does not threaten public safety in the future. As an alternative to criminal charges, the judge and mental health professionals should consider tightening the conditions of her conservatorship by requiring closer supervision.

A pending bill by Assemblyman Antonio Villaraigosa would be a start in fixing an obviously broken system. AB 1762 would establish crisis intervention teams of law enforcement officers and mental health workers based on a successful program in San Jose.

State laws passed in recent years have given prosecutors more power. Most recently, the passage of Proposition 21, a juvenile crime measure, lets prosecutors order mentally ill juvenile felons to adult prison even when judges and public defenders think psychiatric treatment would be more appropriate.

The effort to put Degree in prison is a troubling reminder of what can happen when prosecutors fail to use their powers wisely.