SILLS: To the sheriffs of Georgia
Published 9:00 am Sunday, March 17, 2024
- Letter to the Editor
When Mike Mitchell recently sent out a list of bills from this session of the General Assembly that had crossed over, I realized that the GSA had not taken the position of opposing Senate Bill 533 and I was shocked. I know many of you don’t care for my opinions, but I have above all things, other than the protection of my county, diligently endeavored to protect the Office of Sheriff in Georgia for most of my adult life. I would hope you will agree, though, that I have a pretty good track record of predicting the unintended results, along with sometimes exposing the carefully disguised intentional results, of bills that became the law in our state.
I have said on many occasions that I believed there were operatives in our state government who had intentions of turning our county jails into the new state hospitals when it comes to the criminally insane. I am genuinely confident Senate Bill 533 is the first step in that process. In reality, I think it’s a giant leap. The state’s propaganda surrounding this legislation infers that it will somehow speed up psychological evaluations of inmates in our jails. Such inferences are blatant falsehoods, and this bill has nothing to do with evaluations. This bill addresses inmates who have already been evaluated and found to be incompetent to stand trial. The first sentence of the bill makes its intent very clear as it reads, “… so as to provide for jail-based competency programs…” We are all too familiar with inmates in our jails who are suffering from various mental disorders, but this is about inmates whose mental conditions are so severe that they are incompetent to be tried for the crimes they committed and those whose maladies are so acute that there is no likelihood they will ever be restored to competence in the foreseeable future.
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When a Superior or State Court in this state determines an inmate incarcerated for a crime after an evaluation has been completed is incompetent to stand trial, the court immediately orders the inmate be transferred to custody of what is now known as the Georgia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities (DBHDD). This has been the law in Georgia throughout my career (50 years next month). The very simple reason our courts order those inmates transferred to hospitals is because it is a FACT, one that has been well established in law (Georgia and U.S.), that it is a direct violation of the 8th and 14th Amendments of the United States Constitution to keep a mentally incompetent person in a penal institution!
As many of you are probably already aware, I recently made a complaint to the Chief Superior Court Judge of my circuit that DBHDD was willfully ignoring her order to take an inmate who had been found mentally incompetent into their custody. Said inmate had been in my jail for more than 70 days after the court ordered the inmate into DBHDD custody. DBHDD never notified us to bring her to a state hospital facility until my deputy served Commissioner Kevin Tanner with a notice to appear in court. A contempt hearing was subsequently held in our Superior Court regarding the matter, and the judge found DBHDD and Commissioner Tanner to be in contempt and further ordered DBHDD to reimburse Putnam County $5,588.00 for the cost of medications the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office had to pay for the inmate from the time the court ordered the inmate into DBHDD custody and the time the inmate was actually accepted into their custody.
Since that hearing, I have learned that some, or many of you, have kept inmates in your jails who were found to be incompetent to stand trial for longer than I have and in some cases for years. I had no idea this was going on. Please consider this question: Under what authority do you keep an inmate in your jail who has been ordered into the custody of a state agency? I’m of the opinion that when we do this, we are constructively, if not willfully, violating the constitutional rights of those inmates. I simply cannot arrive at any opinion other than that. Would you keep a prisoner on a Superior Court bench warrant that the court ordered the warrant recalled? Would you remotely consider keeping an inmate in your custody who had been acquitted and found not guilty? I can see no difference in those scenarios than a scenario where we keep an inmate in our custody who has been ordered into the custody of DBHDD because the court found him or her incompetent to stand trial.
I predict SB 533, if it passes and becomes law as damning as it is, will also be the precursor of other legislation that will have a seriously negative impact on the Office of Sheriff in the State of Georgia. It clearly promises to shift the burden of keeping the criminally insane, who are now in the custody of state government, and place it squarely on the backs of Sheriffs and county taxpayers. The state government will, as I have previously said, virtually turn our jails into the new asylums for the criminally insane. Not only will the burden associated with housing these poor unfortunates be upon us, I remind you it will also transfer the costs of paying for and administering their medications. Where in this bill does it say the costs of keeping the mentally incompetent will be borne by the state government?
I believe there’s an insidious side to this proposed law that will open sheriffs and their local taxpayers into an entirely new mine field of liability and litigation. If you sign off on a mutual agreement with DBHDD to engage in one of the “competency restoration” programs, you will also be signing an agreement that you will be accepting full unprotected exposure for the liability associated with unconstitutionally keeping mentally incompetent people in your jail. How long do you think it will be before the ACLU or any number of like organizations files a suit against you, both in your official capacity and personally, for keeping a mentally incompetent person in your jail? What are you going to do when one of these “inmates” refuses to take the psychotropic drugs ordered for him? I urge you to do just a little research into the litigation that has followed when programs like this were implemented in other states. Surely, the County Commissioners of Georgia and the ACCG will also see that since they own the jail structures and property, they, too, will be defendants in these actions. The Attorney General of Georgia will not be defending you and the county. Your county attorney will be doing it, and the taxpayers of your county will be footing the bill.
Those of you who attended the last sheriffs’ conference will remember when Commissioner Tanner spoke to us. He went to great lengths to explain to us the entire problem was a result of DBHDD not having enough beds. He made it crystal clear that the State of Georgia now has only 300 beds to house the severely mentally ill and incompetent. He further expounded on the stated that in 1980 the State of Georgia had 12,000 beds for the mentally ill and incompetent. The population of Georgia at that time was 5.4 million people. Now, the State of Georgia has a population of over 11 million people. The fact that Georgia has only 300 beds seems to me to be a confession of guilt when it comes to mental health issues and amounts to nothing other than gross negligence on the part of the state. Please remember, I asked Commissioner Tanner only one question just before he left our group: How many new beds are under construction? I must congratulate him for his candor, because he looked directly at me and announced the number was zero. I am told our state has a surplus $16 billion and another $11 billion in unallocated funds, yet there are no beds under construction to house the mentally incompetent. The state’s real plan, as Commissioner Tanner opined at the conference, is to turn the county jails of Georgia into mental institutions by legislation.
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Whether a “competency restoration program” is situated in a separate hall located under the roof of a county jail, it’s still in a jail, one that pursuant to Georgia Law you are the sole keeper of. Regardless of the name the program is called, the moniker will not hide the fact that inmates who have been determined to be incompetent will be held in the county jail, and the county jail is a penal institution. I feel compelled to reduce all of this to the simplistic terminology of my rural upbringing: Ladies and gentlemen, you can put lipstick on a sow hog and call her a glamorous debutante, but the truth is she will always be a pig!
I urge you not to enter into any agreement with the state where you agree to keep inmates who have been declared mentally incompetent in your jail. SB533 is a far greater threat than you can imagine, and I implore you to immediately contact ALL of your legislators, the Speaker of the House, our Lieutenant Governor, and our Governor and fervently urge a stop to this bill. You should also make the citizens of your counties aware of this and urge them to do likewise. The people at the capitol often fail to hear our cries, but they pay great attention to the whispers of the voters. The constant burden of shifting state responsibilities to counties is already overwhelming, and this will be a load that we simply cannot carry.
Do you want to continue to be the Chief Law Enforcement Officer of your county, or do you want to be the superintendent of the county mental asylum?
Sheriff Howard R. Sills
Putnam County, Georgia
