Tag Archives: mental health

‘We actually did a mitzvah’

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Bracketed by attorneys Craig Weintraub, left, and Jaye Schlachet, Ariel Castro awaits his Aug. 1 sentencing. (AP / TONY DEJAK)

Craig Weintraub (no relation) and Jay Schlachet, the lawyers who represented Ariel Castro, “the 53-year-old former school bus driver who kept Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight captive in his house for about a decade” have an exclusive interview in the Cleveland Jewish News. If you’d like to know what it’s like to be a defense lawyer in a big media case, read it. If you’d like to understand liberal Jewish faith, read it. Here are a few excerpts.

“Weintraub and Schlachet, who are Jewish, stressed that their faith figured in how they represented Castro in a case that ran 90 days from start to finish and continues to bring worldwide attention to Cleveland.”

…

Despite the “sensational allegations” against him, Castro was entitled to counsel, said Schlachet. “We knew that we picked an unpopular cause to champion, and frankly, from a personal standpoint, I think it’s important to represent unpopular causes because, first of all, it’s what we took an oath to do, and it’s completely consistent with my Jewish upbringing. We actually did a mitzvah representing this man.” Continue reading →

Kill the Ill

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“Kill the ill” is not a law enforcement mandate.

We cannot ignore the statistics, however, that half of the people killed by law enforcement in the United States are mentally ill.

We have such dystopic law enforcement results because we fail to train for crisis intervention, lack oversight, and, of course, we’ve cut back mental services nationwide.

I have known law enforcement agents, detectives and cops my whole life as a federal and state prosecutor and as a criminal defense counsel, and, given the resources, guidance and proper directives, they will do the right thing.

But these killings are distressing.

In Houston, Texas, for example, an officer shot and killed a pen-wielding wheelchair bound double amputee in the head when the police were called to a group home for the mentally ill.

In Saginaw, Michigan, six police officers gunned down a homeless, schizophrenic man in a vacant parking lot when he refused to drop a small folding knife.  Sound familiar. Continue reading →

Lock ’em up, even if it doesn’t work

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Well, the guns-for-all – some mental health restrictions apply – “thinkers” may be experiencing cognitive dissonance. That is, if they’ve found time to seriously ponder thought control advocacy. An article in today’s Washington Post describes the state of the art in violence prediction. The analysts parse patients into two groups.

There have been numerous efforts to test these violence-predicting tools in recent decades. For example, Monahan and his colleagues incorporated 106 risk factors into a software interview program and administered it to patients being discharged from psychiatric units in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Of those judged to be low-risk by this tool, 90 percent committed no violence over the next six months. Of those judged to be high-risk, 49 percent committed violent acts.

Where does that leave our thought control advocates? Lock up the high-risk group and one innocent is deprived of his/her liberty for each potentially violent offender. Release the low-risk group and 10% are potential violent offenders. The numbers suck. The NRA wants to hand those numbers to government? Seriously? Could it be hyperbole? Maybe “dark political energy” will smooth out the looming gross injustice. Or, maybe, we should send Wayne LaPierre and his defenders to the corner, with a dunce hat, to pout.

Gun control or thought control?

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Pastor Doug Giles, Townhall columnist, and all-around "good guy"

 

“No one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going…and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The Sorrows of Young Werther”

If Goethe were alive today, he might replace “biscuits and cake and the rod” with “guns and ammo and mental illness.” Wayne LaPierre, head of the NRA, wants taxpayers to fund a “national database of these lunatics,” because “good guys” need biscuits assault weapons and cake thirty-round clips. In addition to blaming the government for letting “these lunatics” out of the nuthouse, the innocent little LaPierre blames the video game makers (who market the guns and ammo he so adores) for gun carnage. The NRA isn’t likely to change their name to the “National Rifle and Friends of Mental Health Association” any time soon. Here’s what LaPierre said about mental health in a Meet the Press interview:

Continue reading →