When a judge recently ruled that the man accused of killing 80-year-old dog-walker Ruth Dalton was unfit to stand trial, the right started howling with indignation. In August, the man allegedly pulled Dalton from her car, which struck and killed her as her assailant drove away. Like similar high-profile violent crimes in the past, conservatives turned her murder into a cause célèbre, treating the tragedy as a symptom of an epidemic of lawlessness that only more cops and prison cells can cure.
Right now, Dalton’s alleged killer, Jahmed Haynes, is in the hospital to restore his competency to stand trial. After that, if he’s found guilty, then he will almost certainly go to prison for life. But Republican gubernatorial candidate and former King County Sheriff Dave Reichert turned the story into red meat for his base, erroneously posting that the incompetency finding meant Haynes would get “a 90-day stay at the hospital instead of prison.” Only slightly more honest, internet personality Brandi Kruse acknowledged on her podcast that Haynes would get competency restoration and that “we have these protections for a reason.” Still, she expressed doubt that the state hospital would succeed (competency restoration has an 80 percent success rate) and opined that Haynes would get “a free murder.”
Their implication is that—rather than addressing Haynes’s crimes—the bleeding-heart, murder-loving liberal judges will soon send him back to the streets on a technicality, ready to kill again. They argue that Dalton would still be alive today if Haynes had only stayed locked up for life. However, a review of Haynes’s interactions with the criminal justice system for the last 30 years suggests an alternative timeline where this murder never happened. We can envision better ways to intervene in the lives of potential Jahmed Hayneses to prevent future Ruth Daltons from being killed.
Haynes’s Mental Health History Is Revealing
Like so many unprovoked stranger homicides and assaults, this one was clearly rooted in severe, untreated mental illness. Haynes was recorded on surveillance video pacing frantically on the street before attempting to enter the car. When detectives searched his place, they put on hazmat gear because of the accumulated mess inside, a telltale sign of schizophrenic decompensation.
Haynes’s condition was severe but treatable. Records from his previous evaluation at Washington State Hospital show that Haynes responded well to medication and remained asymptomatic during his treatment there. Doctors thought that he posed only a moderate risk if he continued taking his medication, but they noted that his lack of insight into his condition, which is common in schizophrenic patients, presented the biggest risk factor. Haynes did not believe he had a mental illness or needed medication. His doctors regarded that risk factor as “changeable.”
While we don’t know much about the time between his release from prison in 2017 and Dalton’s murder this year, we can say that Haynes had no contact with the criminal legal system for seven years. By all accounts, he remained stable and housed until he decompensated.
The impulse to look at incarceration as a one-size-fits-all solution for all crime and disorder overlooks alternative approaches that yield better results. Timely and sustained intervention in the lives of people with mental illness before and after imprisonment improves public safety. Clinicians did not diagnose Haynes with schizophrenia until 2005, when he was finally referred to the state hospital after an escape attempt. Before then, he had already cycled in and out of the criminal legal system for more than a decade. After his release, the Department of Corrections supervised him for a year until he completed a life-skills course in 2018.
When Haynes was first convicted in 1991 at age 15 for stealing a car, “tough on crime” was the order of the day, even as crime was rapidly declining. Three years later, Washington State passed the nation’s first “three strikes” law, and the federal government enacted the infamous Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which provided almost $10 billion in funding for the prison system. Judges at the time were less likely to show leniency, and diversion options were limited, but early diagnosis and treatment as a teenager could’ve set Haynes on a different path.
The Limitations of the Tough-on-Crime Approach
A knee-jerk response to violent crimes is to call for stricter punishment, but that response ignores the fact that the criminal legal system is a massive, costly machine that, despite massive investments into it, is already reaching its limits. We would get a better return on public safety by investing in caring for the mental health of Washington’s residents.
Though it’s blessed with a booming economy, Washington consistently ranks among the worst states for mental health due to its high numbers of people with mental illness and its middling access to psychiatric services. According to one estimate, 1.5 million adults in Washington experience mental illness, and half of them don’t get treatment annually, often due to expense or lack of access to resources. The picture is worse for the 212,000 with severe mental illnesses like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. Only 40 percent get help each year. They’re twice as likely to end up in jail or prison than they are to land in a hospital. Despite making up around 3 percent of the population, people with diagnosed severe mental illnesses comprise 15 percent of the state’s incarcerated population.
Washington employs a neoliberal mental health model in which nonprofit contractors and private providers primarily serve patients. There’s a dire psychiatrist shortage statewide, and costs are skyrocketing due to increased demand for psychiatric services. Meanwhile, state-run hospitals are chronically at capacity.
The system’s limitations are, ultimately, a policy choice. A surge in misdemeanor referrals for competency restoration, particularly from King County, is one reason state hospitals are overwhelmed. They account for nearly 60 percent of treatment beds statewide. When voters elected Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison to office on a tough-on-crime platform, there was a notable spike in referrals as the Republican ramped up prosecution of so-called high-utilizers, unilaterally shuttered the therapeutic court, and barred the city’s most progressive judge from working on criminal prosecution cases.
Prosecuting high-utilizers—a group of people who frequently appear in the Seattle Municipal Court on misdemeanor charges—is a quixotic endeavor. Most are members of the Trueblood class, meaning they’ve repeatedly been found incompetent to stand trial, but Davison continues referring them to the state for competency evaluation and restoration. More often than not, it’s determined that their competency can’t be restored within the time window for misdemeanors, so charges are dismissed.
In her zeal to criminalize the homeless and the mentally ill, Davison is cramming another thousand or so people into the caseload of a state mental health system that’s already bursting at the seams. Last year, a judge fined the state $100 million for contempt of court regarding the strict timelines for beginning and completing competency restoration. The state is scrambling to increase the number of beds in response, adding nearly a billion dollars to the next budget to build a 350-bed forensic hospital solely to treat competency restoration patients.
At the county level, governments are starting to scale up diversion programs and therapeutic courts, which have better outcomes than jail in terms of future arrests, treatment participation, future hospitalizations, and other key programs. But it’s still not enough, as these programs are underfunded to meet the demand. King County’s Mental Illness and Drug Dependency Fund, which funds diversion programs, accounts for about 8 percent of the county budget’s general fund expenditures. It’s a tiny subset of total spending on cops, courts, and jails that eats up nearly three-quarters of the county’s discretionary budget.
The Path to Lasting Public Safety
On top of more diversion programs, we need greater public investment in mental health beyond the criminal legal system. There’s a growing body of research that shows expanding access to mental health care and adolescent intervention through treatments such as cognitive behavioral therapy significantly reduce crime.
The success of this approach is also borne out by national-level comparisons. Nations with the lowest crime rates are those with the strongest social safety nets, not those with the strictest punishments. Rather than realizing that punishment isn’t effective, the takeaway for conservatives was that Haynes, an “eight-time felon” who spent most of his life in prison, simply wasn’t punished enough. But he might have thrived under a system of outpatient monitoring of the kind offered in Sweden, where a psychiatric nurse supervises treatment and other aspects of post-incarceration care like housing and meeting daily needs.
Norway, a nation of 5.4 million, had 38 homicides in 2023, which is fewer than Seattle had so far this year. This outcome is in no small part due to the country’s sizeable investment in mental health, which accounts for 20 percent of health care spending. The Seattle Metro Area has an economy roughly as large as Norway’s, but with 1.5 million fewer people.
However, instead of mobilizing the vast resources of one of the richest metropolitan areas in human history to solve our housing and mental health crisis, area leaders are doubling down on the failed strategy of criminalization. On top of pointless prosecutions of the mentally ill that waste money and that are frequently dismissed, city officials are escalating sweeps, scaling up surveillance, implementing banishment areas, and raiding housing funds to pay for police raises.
If we want to prevent murders like that of Ruth Dalton, we must get serious about treating mental health problems before they become public safety emergencies.
@1: Points well taken.
He should never have been out in public… we do have the power to prevent this from happening, in his case about $1 worth of electricity. As a sop to the left, maybe solar gererated!
Not all mental health problems can be treated. The only recourse for these situations is permanent confinement.
What this longwinded essay seems to be saying is, if we have to err, err on the side that gets 80 year old women murdered in cold blood at 10 am in their home neighborhoods, as long as we are certain never to infringe the rights of a repeat felon repeat mental health violent patient. As long as that guy is given every break, it’s ok if we murder grandmas.
Progressives’ feelings are more important than public safety. That is the takeaway I see. As long as you feel badly about enforcing the law on people you think don’t deserve to be enforced, it’s OK whatever the risk to the rest of the public might be. Own that, because it is what you are asserting. Progressives’ feelings matter more than victims’ lives.
To @4’s point, yes, we absolutely need to spend more on mental/behavioral health. But no matter how easy access to those services may be, you will always have people so far down that hole that they don’t want help. What then?
“However, instead of mobilizing the vast resources of one of the richest metropolitan areas in human history to solve our housing and mental health crisis, area leaders are doubling down on the failed strategy of criminalization.”
As the positive example given in the headline post notes, Norway is a country, not a “metropolitan area,” and having mental health of criminals as Seattle’s issue alone seems odd when compared to the statewide statistics also given earlier in the headline post.
Although the headline post simply assumes Haynes would have fared better with mental health care the post also simply assumes Seattle should provide, @6’s point remains unanswered. What should Seattle have done, had Haynes not responded as well to treatment as this post assumes?
The passive language in this article reflects poorly on the writer, The Stranger, and the platform’s supposed commitment to “public health”. Quoting Justin’s first paragraph: ” In August, the man allegedly pulled Dalton from her car, which struck and killed her as her assailant drove away.”
So the car, apparently by it’s own volition struck and killed her, while the alleged assailant was just driving away….
Contrast this language with this sentence in Ashley Nerbovig’s article last year: “King County prosecutors must weigh whether to file charges against Seattle Police Officer Kevin Dave, who struck and killed 23-year-old Jaahnavi Kandula while she crossed a crosswalk in January.”
So only if you’re an SPD officer are you personally responsible for striking and killing someone in a vehicle. If not an SPD officer, it’s your car that has done the (alleged) killing!
The article states that Hayes was housed and apparently stable before mentally decompensating and completing this crime – and yet offers no specifics related to how increasing mental health services would have been deployed to prevent this murder.
I think the vast majority of people (even conservatives – gasp!) want to invest in more accessible, affordable and effective mental health services. We should do that. This article provides nothing in the way of specifics of how that can implemented and what the current King County cultural, political, policy and financial barriers are to new and strengthened mental health care systems – and importantly in such cases like this, what alternatives there are to prison, coercive oversight (such as the Sweden model), and forced hospitalization and treatment for individuals who are decompensating and choose not to seek services on their own (the later two – prison in another name to many! See: https://www.thestranger.com/guest-editorial/2023/04/21/78958511/king-countys-crisis-care-centers-will-perpetuate-incarceration-by-another-name).
It’d be great for this platform and people like Justin to treat their own solutions and arguments as seriously as they seem to treat the ‘crime and punishment’ narratives spouted by a minor internet ‘journalist’ and a losing GOP gubenatorial candidate with very little actual influence on King County politics. But The Stranger never seems to, perhaps because the realities are more challenging than – no more cops and yes to Sweden policy!
Mr. Ward:
I will stipulate to the lack of funding and capacity to treat the mentally ill.
That should be remedied; however, because the U.S. Constitution, and Supreme Court precedent, based on cases brought by the ACLU and other advocates for the mentally ill, we can’t treat people in the manner that Norway does. We can’t engage in preventive detention and treatment because of what a mental clinician, family member, or cop thinks a mentally ill person might do if untreated.
Norway has one of the highest involuntary commitment rates in the world. (https://ijmhs.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13033-018-0189-z) Not something we can replicate in the U.S. under Constitutional and SCOTUS limits that Norway doesn’t have.
“He posed only a moderate risk IF he continued taking his medication.” It’s a big “If”.
“Haynes did not believe he had a mental illness or needed medication.”
“By all accounts, he remained stable and housed until he decompensated.”
Under the U.S. Constitution and SCOTUS precedent, not believing you have an illness or need medication WILL NEVER get a ruling to involuntarily commit someone. (I.e. Seize liberty and incarcerate while involuntarily medicating.)
Under U.S. Constitution and SCOTUS precedent, he can’t be committed until he has ALREADY decompensated AND ALREADY has shown overwhelming, objective harm to self or others. Mere words or evidence of delusion is not legally sufficient.
The definition of threat to self or others must be so much in a particular moment of time, and clear-cut as demonstrated by behavior, that making an involuntary commitment before they self-harm or harm another is practically impossible. In rare cases of success, then the mental health facility (or more likely the E.R.) can only keep them until that moment has passed (which if often does with just the time in the E.R. and a single dose of an anti-psychotic med).
By the time we have enough evidence to hold them long enough to make their appreciation of needing treatment and meds “changeable,” its because they have already done the harm. The only question becomes whether their mental state allowed them to know right from wrong and have the ability to control their actions at the moment they actually harmed themselves or someone else. 99.5% of such mental insanity claims fail at trial. We still have a crime victim, and a prison sentence.
Your article doesn’t address the differences in involuntary commitment standards between the U.S., Norway, and most other developed democracies. The U.S. Constitution has some of the strongest INDIVIDUAL civil liberties protections in the world, and the Washington Constitution has even more protections than the U.S. Constitution.
I am not sure we want to go back to the era before SCOTUS got with the program on the U.S. Constitution, and a prosecutor, or someone’s family, could get around taking liberty with guilt beyond a reasonable, determined by a unanimous jury, and instead just elected to find a friendly panel of agreeable doctors to accomplish the same end.
That means that the alternative you suggest, which would mean mental health clinicians, families, friends, co-workers, police, and/or prosecutors making predictions about future behavior, and having the state mandate preventive incarceration, and involuntary treatment, won’t happen here, even if we correct the funding deficits we have with mental health. An 80 year old dog walker, and one of the dogs, would still be dead, and the suspect would still be looking at a 99.5% probability of life without.
I used to have mental health clinicians crying or raging in my office because the patient they had was on a path from control of their mental health to decompensating to the point of losing their job, housing, committing a crime, or some act of violence, etc. With regard to losing their job and housing, they clinician was usually correct. With regard to committing a serious crime or act of violence, 9 times out of 10 they were not correct.
The crying or raging was because they knew what was likely coming with job or housing loss, and could not get the County to even come out to evaluate their patient for involuntary commitment, because no act had yet occurred that the County could succeed with in Superior Court on their Commitment Petition.
“The impulse to look at incarceration as a one-size-fits-all solution for all crime and disorder overlooks alternative approaches that yield better results. “
Two points:
First : Absolutely, yes, public policy should reflect the best evidence-based approaches to crime reduction and public mental health. Innovative approaches that have been shown to work elsewhere should be tried first on a limited basis with ironclad results-tracking, and then scaled up as the results prove efficacy.
Second : If involuntary commitment for serious cases — such as, for example, repeat violent offenders who refuse to take their meds — is considered “incarceration” by this definition, and we can be nearly certain it is, then I have disappointing news for the author. Taking the most seriously mentally ill people off the streets and consigning them to long-term or even permanent involuntary care will be a necessary component of any comprehensive public health approach to mental illness.
In the case of violent, career-criminal schizophrenics whose decompensation occasionally takes the form of carjacking 80-year old women and running them over with their own cars, this would likely mean the kind of mental health care that comes with bars on the windows.
Like @9 pointed out, the difference with Norway and Sweden is involuntary commitment – both countries leverage this approach way beyond what is done (or even allowed) in the US (hell, Sweden even leverages involuntary commitment for drug treatment).
I’m all good with TS writers looking to our Nordic brethren, but please actually have some semblance of how things actually work, not just a progressive cherry picking of something you saw on Reddit.
In the mean time, if we are left with the binary of jail or the streets, jail it will be (our most vulnerable trump the criminally insane). My hope is Mr Haynes is never a free person again (society can’t take that gamble again).
Public health had nothing to do with this. The suspect in this case had multiple contacts with law enforcement and the justice system. He should have been behind bars, but because we don’t believe in punishment anymore, he was free to walk the streets and kill an innocent person.
Did I miss who this Justin Ward is? Don’t see anything at the end of the article. Regardless, I suspect they have zero experience on the front lines helping the mentally ill. The comments here have a better sense of the realities involved, namely, we tend to give the mentally ill the same freedom of choice as everyone else, leading to many choose ‘no meds’. I have a friend with a son with schizophrenia. In and out of jail. No way to simply institutionalize him. In the words of his own mother: “He needs to be swept up and put away”. But how?
I don’t disagree with anything you are saying, but for some reason you left out that this isn’t the first person Haynes killed. The other being my friend, Eric Berge, in 1993. It saddens me so much that no one could find a way to help Haynes between then and now. Personally, I doubt it’s possible.
@5 “What this longwinded essay seems to be saying is, if we have to err, err on the side that gets 80 year old women murdered”
The exact opposite actually. Repeatedly prosecuting and incarcerating this person got an 80 year old woman murdered. Treating his illness could have prevented it. The criminal punishment system failed to protect her but the response from some is we just need to punish harder. Reminds me of the cliche “definition of insanity”
@9 “Norway has one of the highest involuntary commitment rates in the world. Not something we can replicate in the U.S. under Constitutional and SCOTUS limits that Norway doesn’t have.”
Norway involuntarily commits between 150 and 162 people per 100,000 annually (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(19)30090-2/fulltext#tbl1)
Washington State also involuntarily commits around 150 people per 100,000 annually. (https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ps.201900477#F2)
@15, He can’t be treated against his will. It’s a violation of his civil rights.
You need to get comfortable with the idea that some “people” have no place in society, and need to be separated from the general population. This guy, and others like him are sadly members of this group. And no amount of “alternate solutions” will change that. He needs to be put away for good and left to die alone for the good of the rest of society. Actions need to have consequences, or else, what we tolerate will continue. Period.
@18 I would say anyone who puts scare quotes around “people” when discussing an actual human being probably needs to be separated from the general population. Lack of empathy is the classic indicator of a sociopath.
@15: As you could so easily have read in the comment immediately before yours, Haynes had a more extensive criminal history than the headline post reported. Whether this is just sloppy investigative work, the Stranger’s usual disdain for facts which contradict its narratives, or some combination of both, Haynes could have been imprisoned/involuntarily committed for his crimes long before he murdered a senior citizen in her own neighborhood.
As @10 wrote, we should investigate and implement alternative approaches for persons like Haynes, but consideration for safety of the public must come always first. In that is where the Stranger repeatedly fails, and so even the liberal, tolerant citizens of Seattle now routinely ignore the Stranger’s policy recommendations.
@20 he killed someone in the 90s, when the criminal justice system was peak punitive. Why didn’t the harsh punishment he no doubt received get him to change his ways, and why would we again try a strategy that demonstrably failed?
@21: Wow, you’re really not listening, are you? The issue here in the comments was how to protect others from him, if medical interventions did not work. We failed on both counts, and the Stranger, as usual, displays no interest in protecting innocent persons from violent criminals if its preferred method does not work.
@22 and the answer in the article was dramatically scale up mental health treatment in this state. Do you not read the articles before commenting?
@23: Actually, it seemed to be about ramping up mental health care in Seattle, as an alternative to Seattle’s prosecution of individuals like Haynes. “However, instead of mobilizing the vast resources of one of the richest metropolitan areas in human history to solve our housing and mental health crisis,”
The point asked by commenters remains unanswered: what if all of this mental health treatment fails? The treatment Haynes had received had failed to convince him he even had a problem, much less that he needed to keep addressing it. In that case, incarceration should be an option, but the Stranger never advocates for this.
I am Ruth’s granddaughter, Melanie. All this is not 100% accurate. Haynes was on medication while in prison in 2003, when he STABBED a prison guard. The only reason the guard survived was because he had a clipboard and deflected fatal blows. HAYNES WAS INCARCERATED AND MEDICATED when he did this. He was then sent to Western for his first round of Restoration therapy. He admitted that he knew exactly what he was doing, had planned it for a week, and was aware that it would be his 3rd strike (should have been and was originally charged as such). He knew if would result in life imprisonment if convicted. HE STILL CHOSE TO ATTACK THAT GUARD. Someone in Snohomish County decided it was “justice best served” to amend the charges to a non-strike offense and he served 15 years.
Had Snohomish County kept the strike offense of Assault 2, Haynes would have been in prison for life. That alone would have spared my grandmother’s life. He was not out on the street because of his mental health, he was out because someone got soft and decided that stabbing a prison guard wasn’t worth locking Haynes up for life. But I point out these things and ask these questions……. if a man has two strike convictions for VIOLENCE AGAINST OTHERS, is INCARCERATED AND MEDICATED, and STILL plans and executes a 3rd VIOLENT crime, WHY WAS A DEAL MADE?! Why was he ever released?! If he is locked up and medicated and still is a threat to an armed guard, why would anyone think he could ever be released and not pose a threat to people?!