Sometimes when a person is charged with a crime, the judge will order a mental health exam.
"If that person is found to be preliminarily incompetent, then they're committed to the Department of Mental Health for competency restoration," Rikki Wright, the department's Behavioral Health Division deputy director, told a Senate committee Tuesday. "The whole reason why they're coming to the department is for us to treat their mental illness and restore them to competency, so that they can be tried on their criminal charge."
Also sometimes, Sen. Jeanie Riddle, R-Mokane, told the Senate's Judiciary and Civil and Criminal Jurisprudence Committee, those patients referred by the court "need medication for their psychiatric condition. If the patient refuses medication, the department has an operating regulation (it) follows whenever it considers involuntarily medicating a patient."
However, Wright told the committee, "We are finding, in some jurisdictions, that the public defender's office is routinely filing a motion with the court requesting that involuntary medication not be allowed by the Department of Mental Health.
"This is not widespread across the state - it's just happening in some jurisdictions. But, as you can imagine, that causes some difficulty for the department, given that they have been committed to us for treatment and competency restoration."
Wright said the department's goal is to "treat their mental illness and restore them to competency, if possible."
However, when there's a motion to prevent the department from providing medication involuntarily, she added, "We can't treat them. We can't restore them to competency.
"And the individual ends up, in essence, in legal limbo - because our doctors can't opine on their competency if we can't try them on medication."
Riddle wants lawmakers to support her bill, to give DMH lawyers legal standing to fight those requests when filed by a defense attorney.
"The goal would be to eliminate the argument that the department cannot challenge involuntary medication orders," she explained. "It should be made clear that the department is not trying to aid in the prosecution or the defense of the patient - they simply want to provide treatment when clinically appropriate.
"Both the defense and the prosecution retain their existing authorities - but the department would have standing to challenge involuntary medication orders."
No one testified against the bill.
If patients are denied medication, Riddle said: "They will either hurt themselves, or somebody else."