Symposium addresses nexus of criminal justice and the mentally ill

SALT LAKE CITY — Sim Gill calls it “one of the most difficult calls in my life as a public prosecutor.”

Several years ago, an elderly woman called the Salt Lake County district attorney and told him about her severely mentally ill adult son. Gill said the woman and her husband had done their best over the years to help and support their son with what few recourses they had. But they were older now and worn down from years of caring for him.

“She asked me, with the love of a mother, sincere in her voice, ‘Mr. Gill, what felonies can I have my son commit so he can get the medication and support that he needs when we’re not here?'” Gill recalled.

“Imagine a mother asking a prosecutor what crimes she could have and advise her son to violate.”

Gill’s comments were delivered Wednesday at a symposium he hosted to discuss mental health and the criminal justice system. State, county and private health professionals, state representatives, city council members, defense attorneys and more gathered at the district attorney’s office building in an effort to find real solutions on how to help individuals with mental illness who are also overwhelming a criminal justice system that doesn’t have the resources to properly address the issue.

Over the years, the criminal justice system has become the solution for the “vacuum of failed public policies,” the district attorney said.

“The criminalization of public health issues became our norm. You and I would not criminalize someone with heart disease. You and I would not criminalize someone for having diabetes. Unfortunately, mental illness driven by shame, stigma and fear continues to be criminalized even today. That’s part of our challenge,” Gill said.

“In moments of crisis, we look to our criminal justice system to be our crisis manager,” he said, while adding that it is a mistake to think the criminal justice system can be used as a solution to the problem.

Community mental health centers to treat people who commit low-level offenses were never properly funded, he said. And those types of individuals needing help end up in justice court.

“Justice courts were never created, nor do they have the infrastructure or the resources to address the complexity of these individuals. If there is a flaw systematically, we don’t have an infrastructure for justice court. And we certainly don’t populate them with the resources in an easily accessible, usable way,” Gill said.

Those who commit low-level crimes but are not legally competent to stand trial are often homeless and are among the most vulnerable and overlooked in our society, the district attorney says.

“These individuals are often caught in a revolving door — arrested, released, fail to appear in court, picked up again — and traditional prosecution in the criminal justice system just does not work. What is needed is sustained intervention, housing, health care, case management,” Gill said.

“It just should not come as a surprise. Yet, at this low level, that is an escalating, cascading, overwhelming weight that is being put on this population. Because now they’re just going to be burdened with one arrest warrant after another,” he said. “So these low-level courts, really, are by their own design incapable of addressing the population that we are insisting that they address.

“What this tells me is there’s an over-dependence on the criminal justice system. While it has a role to play and can even create meaningful off-ramps, fundamentally it should be on the peripheral for the conversation, not the center of this conversation.”

Gill said he is not pointing a finger at any individual or department for the systematic failures. Rather, he is raising these points to get people to think about the overall problem.

He concluded his comments by talking about a case his office is currently investigating, which he says “captures the worst-case scenario in these circumstances.” Gill told the group about the case of a man who was released from the Utah State Prison, and within 15 days of his release, the man stabbed his two parents to death before being shot and killed by police.

Although Gill did not name the person on Wednesday, he seemed to be talking about Erik Bertelsen, 35, who police say killed his parents, Terri Bertelsen, 63, and Kerry Bertelsen, 67, before he was shot and killed by police in January.

In that case, Gill said the man began self-medicating with drugs after being released from prison because he had no access to real medication. Just five days after being released, police responded to a report of the man lying in the middle of the road, allegedly hoping he would be run over. He was “pink sheeted,” or involuntarily committed to a psychiatric unit at a hospital, but was soon released. The man even contacted Adult Probation and Parole prior to the killings, saying he should be arrested again, Gill said.

“This is horrific, this is tragic,” Gill said. “How did we, as a community, fail the person who we are now filing criminal charges against? … This is the weight of what we’re working with. This is how real it is.”