According to KTHV Channel 11 in Little Rock last night, after shooting Gwatney, Johnson then went down the street and threatened employees at the Arkansas Baptist State Headquaters.
I don't know if it would have mattered in this case, but there was a time when we had a lot more mental hospitals than we do today. We had something like ten times as many beds per capita in these facilities than we do today. We stuck a lot of people in these institutions against their will, and a lot of people thought this was inhumane. There were probably abuses. There are a lot of stories about things like husbands having their wives committed so they could be with another woman or whatever, and there ended up being a big push to close these facilities, let people out and provide outpatient services for them. We let them out but never provided any outpatient services, and now we have a lot more crazy people walking our streets than ever. I spent many years as a public defender and I had to deal with a lot of these people. Not surprisingly, a very large percentage of people committing crimes have mental disorders.
I had a case one time I'll never forget. One of the first cases I got as a public defender was a terroristic threatening case where my client had threatened to kill his supervisor at the Walmart where he worked. He told his boss he was going to slit his throat and do all these awful things to him. I said, “You didn't mean any of this right, you were just blowing off steam, right.” He told that actually he think he did mean it, that the voices in his head were getting louder and he was hearing them more and more often, telling him to do these horrible things. He was afraid that he was actually going to kill someone. I asked him if he'd ever seen a psychiatrist or psychologist about any of this and if he'd ever been prescribed medication. He told he had been diagnosed with some sort of personality disorder and they said he was schizophrenic and they had prescribed him anti-psychotic medication in the past. I asked him if the medicine helped. He said it did make the voices go away, but it cost something like $250 a month and he couldn't afford it. He never had health insurance because he couldn't keep job long enough to be eligible for employer sponsored insurance.
This guy wasn't trying to play any games with me. I'd already gotten him a deal where he could get a suspended sentence. The victim only wanted him to get help. I had some connections and I got a psychiatrist to see him free of charge and get him started on sample meds. I also got him in to see people that would help him get on Medicaid. We got lucky and in no time he ended up getting Medicaid and I think in a few months SSI, and within a few more months he was able to get a job and stay with it long enough to get health insurance and then he got off of the government assistance. Years later he still had the same job and everything was going fine.
I don't like welfare and all that, but sometimes it makes sense for us to provide mental healthcare to people who are a great nuisance to us and/or dangerous. We won't always be able to just give people medication and make them okay. Some we need to put in institutions and keep them there for the good of us all. I'd run into cases all the time where there was nothing we could do. There were no facilities to put these people in except for jails where they'd often just get worse. And the jails do not want them. It's bad enough to have to take care of a bunch of criminals. They don't want to have to deal with a bunch of lunatics too. The problem is though that there is just nowhere else to put them. There is a procedure for involuntarily committing people, but at least in my state when that happens they rarely ever keep these people more than few days. We have one state hospital where they put these people and they have limited bed space. They keep the criminally insane there who have done horrible things like kill folks but who have been found not guilty by reason of insanity. They don't have room for all the nuts out there. So what we end up doing with these people is we just “Otis” them for the most part. Do you remember Otis from the Andy Griffith show? He was the drunk they'd put in a cell and let him sleep it off and then let him go in the morning. We pick these people up when they are causing problems, maybe keep them for a day or two, and then we just let them go. Some of them are just crazy as can be. Some of them are dangerous, but we don't know what to do with them. It's a huge gaping crack in the system. We need more state mental health facilities and more programs in place to deal with the real problem crazy people out there. It may not have helped in this particular case that is the topic of this thread, but it would cut down on a lot of senseless crime in this country.