Me, the Teacher?

As a result of my last post, and the various helpful comments on it, I have been thinking more about my competency cases. Our competency section of the criminal code is quite confusing and not well written. None of the DA's seem to have a firm grasp on how it works, and never seem able to prepare the various orders required for different phases in the proceedings correctly. We've had people hanging out in jail for extended periods after the judge decides to send them to the mental hospital waiting for the DAs to write an order that is acceptable to the hospital. These types of cases also seem to confuse the court staff, because it seems they open a new civil case every time competency is raised in a criminal case already in District Court. This means that once the competency issue is decided and the criminal case either continues or is dismissed, the civil case just hangs out on the court docket indefinitely. In addition, when I was going through the cases transferred to me from an attorney who left our office, I ran across evidence that he had only the vaguest idea what competence to stand trial means, never mind the proper procedures he should have followed in the process. After talking to various other attorneys in our office, it became clear to me that I seem to be the only lawyer in our office with a good understanding of both what competence to stand trial is, and how to proceed when this becomes an issue.

I therefore, for better or worse, volunteered to give a sort of mini-tutorial to our office on how to handle competency cases. Perhaps once our attorneys all understand how this works, we can get these cases dealt with in the proper way, rather than this hit-or-miss approach that seems to occurring now. In addition, maybe we can get the new judge to understand how this works also, and in this way avoid these unnecessary status conferences she has been scheduling to find out why these cases seem to take forever. There is even an off chance we could avoid our clients being in limbo indefinitely while waiting for the proper paperwork to be filed, or having their cases take forever due to competence being raised when there was no need for it to have been.

This all seems good on paper (or the computer screen). I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens. Now all I have to do is try to find a way to explain to 10 lawyers (most of whom think they know more than me) how this all is supposed to work. Wish me luck!