BURLINGTON, Vt. (WCAX) – Requests for mental competency evaluations led to backlogs during the pandemic that state officials say are starting to ease with what officials say are some new fixes. However, not everyone agrees that the new shortcuts are serving either potential defendants or their victims and families.
Officials with the Vermont Department of Mental Health say a new law and the addition of doctors qualified to screen patients, has sped up the process of determining whether offenders are mentally able to face charges.
“We understand that it did cause some delays and that was frustrating for folks,” said the department’s Karen Barber.
She points to impacts from the pandemic as well as state mental health evaluators retiring from their positions. At the height of the backlog, there was a 12-month wait for outpatient evaluations. “We no longer had an in-person option, too. Nobody was allowed in hospitals, so in-patient evaluations weren’t occurring that way. And most outpatients were occurring at court houses, so when court houses closed, there was no place to do them, so we really had to scramble,” Barber said.
Other factors that played into the backlog included lack of access to medical records and asking the department to provide sanity evaluations as well. Barber says her department asked the Legislature for a fix that was delivered last year.
Act 28 requires the release of all relevant medical records and DMH is responsible only for providing competency evaluations, not sanity.
The new law also allows psychologists, not just psychiatrists, to perform evaluations. “The other thing we did was hire InnovaTel, which does mostly telepsychiatry. And we have at this point 12 psychiatrists that we use, forensically trained psychiatrists that we use through them,” Barber said.
Those experts are spread out across the country. Tom Powell, a forensic psychologist who also conducts these evaluations in-state, is not a fan of using telehealth for competency screenings. “Mental illness, which is oftentimes at the core of a competency question, impairs a person’s ability to interact with others, and that includes judges and prosecutors and defense attorneys. And we can get a better handle on that, in my judgment, than people 3,000 miles away looking through a TV screen,” he said
Jared Bianchi, a deputy state’s attorney in Bennington County, says the current system for dealing with mentally ill people is working overall but that more changes are needed. “It does not give as much consideration as we feel would be appropriate to the interest of victims, or to ensuring that people don’t continue to end up in that cycle of incarceration, charges, hospitalization, and release,” he said.
Some prosecutors are also calling for a forensic facility in Vermont. They also say individuals must meet specific criteria to be supervised by departments like mental health and that there needs to be a focus on public safety after these evaluations are complete.