Judge holds Washington state in contempt for not providing services to mentally ill people in jails
Judge holds Washington state in contempt for not providing services to mentally ill people in jails
A federal judge has found Washington state in contempt and ordered it to pay more than $100 million for failing to provide timely psychiatric services to mentally ill people who must wait in jails for weeks.
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I'm confused. Who is paying the fine to whom? Like is Washington state going to write itself a check, or does the money go to the fed, or what?
Good question, this is the state of Washington being sued by the federal government in a federal court, so I think there's basically no way Washington's writing it to itself, but behind that idk. It's possible all the fine money is going to get thrown into a fund that will be overseen by the court and used to improve these services (I want to say I read about something similar being done in a different federal lawsuit against a state for having crappy public schools), but I'm guessing, and there's a decent chance nobody knows since it seems like the court didn't want it to come to this,
The state entered into a settlement agreement in 2018 and agreed to address the wait times, but they’ve only grown longer, Pechman said.
Instead of providing more space in its psychiatric hospitals, the state closed wards, she said.
“The Court is unpersuaded that DSHS adequately planned for and took reasonable measures to address the bed shortage,” Pechman said. It continued to accrue fines as it missed its court-ordered marks. Those funds were held in abeyance, but Pechman now wants the state to pay $100 million of those fines.
[Bolding added]
In other words, if I'm reading that right, WA has already racked up over $100m in fines related to this case, but the judge had never made payment for any of them due on any particular date because she understood that fining a broke state agency for failing to spend money on helping people is kind of counter productive, but they've fucked around so much and hurt so many people at this point that she doesn't feel she has any other choice.