BROOKHAVEN, Miss. (AP) - A man who spent nearly two years stuck in a southwest Mississippi jail awaiting mental health treatment has now been sent to a state hospital after prosecutors agreed to drop criminal charges.
The Daily Leader reports charges were dropped Monday in Lincoln County against Randy Hugh Smith, 43, and he was committed in a civil proceeding by a chancery judge to the Mississippi State Hospital at Whitfield. That was after 667 days in the Lincoln County Jail.
“This is the best result - the state hospital is where he needed to be,” said public defender Lesa Baker. “Mental health treatment is what he needed, and what we were seeking for him.”
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Smith is one of a number of inmates statewide who have spent long stretches in county jails awaiting treatment at the overstretched 15-bed unit at Whitfield for prisoners. As of September, Smith was No. 14 on the statewide waiting list of 84 patients. The unit evaluates whether prisoners are fit to stand trial, and then tried to restore those who are mentally ill to competency so they can be tried.
Arrested Christmas Day 2016, Smith had been charged with a felony of harassing calls to 911 for trying to use ambulances for rides into Brookhaven from his camper miles away. He’d been convicted of the crime three times previously. The Department of Mental Health doesn’t accept people facing felony charges for civil commitment.
Baker said state hospital director James Chastain told her that Smith seemed more in need of treatment than competency restoration.
“He’s basically already served his sentence, even if he’s found guilty,” Baker said. “So we took the chancery court route. I explained to Randy that this would get him treatment quicker, and he did not contest it.”
District Attorney Dee Bates and Lincoln County Sheriff Steve Rushing also agreed that dropping the charges was the best plan.
“It was the best thing for Randy, and the best thing for Lincoln County,” Bates said. “We’re not going to find guilt or innocence on Randy. If we continued on the path we were on, it could have been six or eight more months of him sitting in the Lincoln County Jail, and that isn’t good for anybody.”
The Daily Leader had outlined Smith’s plight in a Sept. 8 story.
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Information from: The Daily Leader, http://www.dailyleader.com
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