Testimony from all quarters depicts James’s condition similarly. To use Steinberger’s words in his letter to Baldacci, “he continually slits open his arms and legs with chips of paint and concrete, smears himself and his cell with feces, strangles himself to unconsciousness with his clothing, and constantly bangs his head against the concrete walls of his cell and cuts it open on the edge of the tray slot in the solid steel cell door. He also bites, hits, kicks, spits at, and throws urine and feces on his guards.” The guards often have reacted by harshly “extracting” him from his cell and strapping him into a restraint chair.
Steinberger is worried that James eventually will kill himself if he remains in the Supermax.
After he wrote Baldacci, Steinberger began thinking about suing the state on behalf of James. Working now without pay, he started seeking helpers. Helen Bailey, a lawyer with the Disability Rights Center advocacy group, began advising him. She got him together on July 7 with health and human services commissioner Brenda Harvey, corrections commissioner Martin Magnusson, and state attorneys Sleek and Greason. Bailey, who also attended the meeting, was a key player in the class-action lawsuit on behalf of mental patients that in 1990 saw a judge take over the state’s inadequate mental health care system. The system is still under court supervision.
“It’s about control,” is how Steinberger summarizes the July 7 meeting.
Harvey said she plans to take James into Riverview “soon,” he says, but not because of the jury’s verdict or the judge’s order.
“They’re saying they plan to commit him on an emergency basis,” Steinberger says, which would give DHHS and Corrections the power to send James back to prison whenever they agree, essentially allowing James to be imprisoned by bureaucratic fiat.
The people he met with greatly resisted the idea that “they would have to keep him at Riverview until he was cured,” as the judge ordered, Steinberger says.
Their argument, he reports, is that the state now has conflicting legal orders — the original sentences of imprisonment and this new order for mental treatment — and they can choose which one they want to follow first. This is “specious nonsense,” Steinberger says, because James would continue to serve his prison sentence while in the mental hospital. The officials, he says, didn’t reveal why this control over James is so important to them.
And they and others do not express a rationale after inquiries from the Phoenix.
“We’re not duty-bound to explain” to the public the reasoning behind the letter to the judge when litigation may be in the offing, says Attorney General Steven Rowe’s spokesman, Charles Dow. “We’re not legal consultants to the Phoenix or anyone else.”
Commissioner Harvey says she can’t talk about individual cases because of confidentiality laws. But she did suggest DHHS would treat James in some fashion, saying that she read the Attorney General’s office’s letter as not requiring her department “to wait nine years to provide mental health treatment” to him.
The governor’s spokeswoman, Crystal Canney, says Harvey’s response constitutes the Baldacci administration’s statement on this issue.
Deputy corrections commissioner Denise Lord, who also was at the July 7 meeting, says she doesn’t know why the state attorneys made the decision they did. But she notes: “It’s the first time the situation has come up — that we’ve had someone who’s incarcerated who’s been found not criminally responsible.”
