Critics say Baker Act a futile cycle in state
When Tonya Williams stopped eating, started giving away her clothes and furniture and threatened to kill herself, her mother called 911. It wasn’t the first time.
Officers picked up Williams, 25, under Florida’s Baker Act, which allows mental health facilities to hold a person for up to 72 hours for an evaluation. But despite the young woman’s eight-year history of mental illness — including at least four previous Baker Act stays, a monthlong hospitalization and diagnoses for schizophrenia and bipolar depression — she was out two days later.
Her mother, Valerie Newton, called police again. “They have to take her back,” she begged. “I feel like she is dying in front of my eyes and there’s nothing I can do.”
The next day, Feb. 25, 2015, Williams ran into traffic on a busy section of Pine Hills Road near Silver Star Boulevard. By the time an ambulance got her to the hospital, she was dead.
“I don’t understand why in the world they let her out,” her mother says, still anguished. “Why couldn’t they see she needed help?”
This week, those mourning the deaths of two Kissimmee Police officers are asking a similar question.
The accused killer, Everett Glenn Miller — a 45-year-old U.S. Marine Corps veteran — had been taken to a mental health facility under the Baker Act a month before the shootings.
But like Williams, he was also released without hospitalization.
The cases underscore criticism of the Baker Act system that has persisted for years — that too many people cycle through with little or no follow-up treatment, including those who are seriously ill.
Of nearly 195,000 Floridians taken into custody for a Baker Act evaluation in fiscal year 2015-2016, the most recent data available, most were released with no follow-up.
In Central Florida, no more than a fifth of those cases make it to a court hearing on whether to require further treatment, and Miami-Dade County Judge Steve Leifman says that, statewide, less than 2 percent are ultimately deemed a danger to themselves or others and committed to mental hospitals.
“These folks who are so sick are just recycling through a failed system — and then you add guns and access to guns and you get the perfect storm, which is what you had in Kissimmee,” says Leifman, the state’s leading advocate for reform. “Most people walk out within an hour. It’s horrifying.”
Meanwhile, the number of people held under the Baker Act continues to climb every year — up 105 percent since 2001 and far outpacing the population growth of 22 percent for the same period.
For children and teens, the numbers are especially steep: 32,000 in a single year, up by nearly 50 percent over five years earlier.
And hundreds of people of all ages have undergone repeated Baker Act evaluations — some more than 35 times each.
Officials and advocates say no single cause is behind the rise. They cite a combination of greater awareness of mental illness, a well-meaning attempt to divert mentally ill people from jail and even economic turmoil and homelessness.
But the Baker Act was never supposed to be a revolving door. It was designed to be a safety net.
Named after Maxine Eldridge Baker, a former Miami representative in the Florida House of Representatives, the 1971 law allows courts, law-enforcement officers, doctors and various mental-health professionals to initiate an examination for individuals believed to be mentally ill and having a “substantial likelihood” of causing “serious bodily harm” to themselves or someone else. The three-day time limit for the evaluation was imposed to protect people from being held indefinitely.
After the exam, they must either be released, agree to voluntary treatment or have a court hearing scheduled to determine whether they can be kept longer. At that point, they have a right to an attorney.
“The difficulty with involuntary placement is that the standard is having “clear and convincing evidence” — which is a really high threshold,” says Martha Lenderman, a Pinellas County consultant and expert on the Baker Act. “And they only look at the immediate situation. So the doctor may say, ‘Well, he’s stable now,’ but he is only maybe stable until he gets out and stops taking the medication.”
And many say there’s another problem: Outpatient services can be expensive or have long waiting lists.
“People get so frustrated that they can’t get help that they end up in the crisis system,” says Donna Wyche, division manager of mental health and homeless programs for Orange County government. “It’s like the emergency rooms for hospitals. If you beef up primary care, you cut down on the emergency room visits.”
Two years ago, the county launched a mobile crisis system for children and teens — available 24 hours a day, seven days a week — designed to reach youth in their homes, avoiding an arrest or the Baker Act. Wyche says it seems to be working: The first year, children made up about 14 percent of the total Baker Act cases in Orange. For Seminole, Lake and Osceola, the rate ranged from about 20 percent to 25 percent. She would like to see the program expanded to help adults.
“I think we need more front-end programs, more education and more acceptance of the fact that [mental illness] is a disease,” Wyche says.
It was a theme repeated last week at the joint funerals of Kissimmee Police Sgt. Richard “Sam” Howard and Officer Matthew Baxter.
“We have to use everything in our power as the greatest country on earth to provide long-term mental-health care, especially for veterans,” Police Chief Jeff O’Dell told the crowd of 5,000. To widespread applause, he challenged the audience — including Gov. Rick Scott — to make changes even after the mourning period ends.
If change comes, of course, it will arrive too late for Tonya Williams or Everett Glenn Miller, who faces first-degree murder charges. As Leifman notes, if Miller is now found too mentally ill to stand trial, he’ll be sent to a state forensic hospital, where he’ll get treatment designed to make him competent enough to help in his own defense.
“Sadly,” the judge says, “if they had hospitalized him earlier and gotten him treatment, this tragedy might never have happened.”