SANTA ANA – Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer issued the following statement:
Twelve criminal defendants, including a defendant charged with hacking a stranger to death with a hatchet and a man arrested trying to break into his neighbor’s house to rape her, who have been determined to be so mentally ill they could not be restored to competency after two years of treatment in a state mental hospital will be released back to Orange County neighborhoods in the next two months if the County of Orange is unable to find them treatment beds in a licensed, locked down facility.
When a defendant is so mentally ill that they are not restored to competency during their two-year treatment period at the Department of State Hospitals, criminal proceedings which are overseen by the District Attorney come to an end, and as a result the District Attorney has no further say in protecting the public in these cases. Once the criminal proceedings are ended, the only other option is either a Murphy conservatorship with the County’s Public Guardian – which must be in a locked down, state licensed facility, or release back into our communities with well-documented mental illness, and no treatment or oversight…