Ohio courts must report mental health info

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COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Courts in Ohio must now report certain
mental health information about people convicted of violent crimes for
inclusion in a law enforcement database.
A rule approved by the
Ohio Supreme Court requiring that notification took effect Jan. 1. The
court devised the new document that judges must submit to police about
violent offenders with a mental illness under legislation signed into
law last year by Gov. John Kasich.
The law requires judges to
report order when they order mental-health evaluations or treatment for
people convicted of a violent crime or approve conditional release for
people found incompetent to stand trial or not guilty by reason of
insanity. In response to the law, the state Supreme Court had to devise a
rule for judges to follow in making those reports.
"Having that
information is power," Clark County Sheriff Gene Kelly told The Columbus
Dispatch (http://bit.ly/KoEKkm). "It allows us to more properly
diagnose a situation."
The legislation known as the Deputy Suzanne
Hopper Act was introduced after the Clark County Sheriff’s deputy was
fatally shot in 2011 by a man with a criminal history who had been
conditionally released from a mental health institution. There was no
readily available database then to alert law enforcement about a violent
offender’s mental health history.
With that information entered
into a national database, deputies and officers will now be able to
determine how to approach a person with a history of violence and mental
illness when serving subpoenas or probate orders or making stops, Kelly
said.
"We certainly don’t think that this means every officer is
going to be safe, but the more information we have, the more we have in
our favor," Jay McDonald, president of the Ohio Fraternal Order of
Police, told the newspaper.
Laura Moskow Sigal, executive director
of Mental Health America of Franklin County, said putting names of
violent criminals diagnosed with mental illness in the database is
appropriate. But she is concerned that people’s names could be wrongly
entered, with no recourse to get their names expunged.
"Our big
concern is what happens when someone commits a violent act and then is
evaluated and does not have a mental-health issue," Sigal said. "They
then end up being on a database nationwide when they don’t have a
mental-health issue. That’s a severe infringement on civil rights."
Betsy
Johnson, associate executive director of the National Alliance on
Mental Illness Ohio, said her organization supports the Ohio law and
believes "the more information that law-enforcement officers have prior
to arriving on a scene, the better."
Hopper was shot on New Year’s
Day 2011 by Michael Ferryman at a trailer park near the village of Enon
in Clark County. She was investigating a report of shots fired and did
not know that Ferryman had been accused of shooting at officers in 2001
in another county and was later found not guilty by reason of insanity.
He was killed in a shootout with police at the trailer park.
Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights
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