Six times is the charm. Six times. That's how many times my mentally retarded client (IQ of 62) had to go through the criminal justice system before a court decided it needed to ask whether or not his mental health issues might be contributing to him getting in trouble. My client (I'll call him "Joe') was charged in Comal County with misdemeanor Possession of Marijuana. Joe had five prior marijuana convictions. In all five of the previous cases, he had court-appointed lawyers who pled him guilty without bothering to inquire into his mental health issues, even though having a conversation with Joe is like speaking with a child.
In one case, Joe managed to get through a few months of probation in Bexar County (Bexar County Adult Probation never directed him to, or offered him any mental health services) before the probation was revoked and he was sent to jail. In his last case, his court-appointed lawyer in Seguin pled him to a 30 day sentence at the first court setting. While in Guadalupe County Jail, other inmates repeatedly intimidated him and threatened him with assault. Joe's mother, who works a menial job at HEB, has no health insurance that will cover Joe's mental health needs and cannot supervise him 24/7 while she's trying to make ends meet. When she tried to navigate through the maze of MHMR in Bexar County, the only response she could get was that Joe wasn't suicidal and in need of emergency services.
Although I am on the complete opposite end of the political spectrum from Judge Charles Stephens of the Comal County Court-at-Law No. 2, I give him a ton of credit for being the first judge to take the time deal with Joe's mental health issues. Judge Stephens ordered a psychological evaluation of Joe, which confirmed that he is mentally retarded. The judge also ordered that he be placed on the Comal County Adult Probation Department's mental health caseload, and that the probation not be transferred out-of-county, to make sure that Joe could receive much-needed treatment and to make sure that Joe's case would not fall through the cracks.
Hopefully, Joe will get the help he needs so that he never returns to the criminal justice system. If anybody asked me "How can you represent those people?", one one of the answers I would give is that, after 19 years of doing this, I still have the capacity to get pissed off when I see both criminal courts and my so-called "colleagues" screw over the Joes of the world. If the Legislature can't see fit to provide help to the mentally retarded, instead of using the criminal justice system as dumping ground, maybe at least the Lege can reform the criminal justice system by requiring court-appointed counsel to have an IQ higher than 62.