By Alaine Griffin
The Hartford Courant
HARTFORD — A legally insane man’s fight to stay at Connecticut’s maximum-security psychiatric hospital following his arrests in connection with a series of violent assaults there will go to the state’s highest court Thursday.
For Francis Anderson, arguments before the state Supreme Court on his appeal of Judge David P. Gold’s unusual ruling ordering Anderson held at a state prison on a $100,000 pretrial bond can’t come soon enough.
In a handwritten letter that Anderson recently sent to The Courant from Northern Correctional Institution, Connecticut’s super-maximum-security prison in Somers, where he has been held since August, he said he has been harming himself because he is not getting mental health treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder at the prison.
“I need your help,” Anderson said in the letter, which was copied to Gov. Dannel P. Malloy and Attorney General George Jepsen and includes photocopies of photos of Anderson wearing a restraint vest and a close-up of a gash on his forehead.
But staff members at the Whiting Forensic Division of Connecticut Valley Hospital in Middletown say that Anderson should remain in prison. His return to the hospital, they said, would be dangerous for both employees and patients.
Anderson, 45, found not guilty by reason of insanity in 2013 of assaulting a correctional officer, is extremely violent and intimidating, hinders nurses’ work with other patients and refuses treatment, staff members say.
Nearly a dozen staff members, including several who attended Anderson’s recent pretrial hearings at Superior Court, praised Gold’s unprecedented decision to set bail, which resulted in Anderson’s return to prison, a more restrictive setting than Whiting. The longtime employees, who have spent years dealing with violent situations at the hospital, said that Anderson’s aggression — often unprovoked — is off the charts.
“Like the judge said, whether you have mental health issues or not, you still can’t go out and hurt people and get away with it,” said Darla White, a Whiting staff member who was injured when she said an irate Anderson hurled a metal food service cart at her and another employee during an attack at the hospital last year.
White said that Anderson bolted into a room that day and began “viciously swearing, cussing, threatening to kill us. It was a very brutal attack out of the blue. One second it was quiet, and the next, the whole unit was in an uproar.”
Since Anderson’s transfer to prison, staff members said the hospital’s atmosphere is less stressed and more therapeutic.
“I’m sorry, but in my words, he’s an animal and he belongs behind bars,” White said. “I hate to say that because it’s not a nice thing to say about anybody, but he’s not a nice person and that’s where he belongs, caged up.”
Legal observers say that the case before the justices has no precedent in Connecticut.
“This is a very unusual case. I’m really curious to see how they weigh in on it,” said Ellen Lachance, executive director of the Psychiatric Security Review Board, which monitors people acquitted of crimes by reason of insanity. Lachance said that she could not recall another case in which the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services had not been able to manage a patient acquitted of a crime by reason of insanity.
Following his 2013 insanity acquittal, Anderson was committed to Whiting for 10 years. But in less than a year there, Anderson was arrested eight times for assaulting staff members and patients in violent attacks and altercations.
During an arraignment in August on a charge of assault of a public safety officer/health care personnel, Gold imposed the $100,000 bond, rejecting Anderson’s argument that the court cannot set bail for someone acquitted by reason of insanity who has been charged with subsequent serious crimes at the hospital.
Not setting bail, Gold said, would mean that those found not guilty by reason of insanity would be free to commit however many serious crimes they wanted with the guarantee that they would be returned to the hospital with the same victimized staff and patients.
Unable to make bail, a move that would have put him back at Whiting, Anderson went into the custody of the Department of Correction and was locked up at Northern. Gold said that Anderson could get mental health treatment while in prison as the new criminal charges against him were pending.
But Anderson took his case to a higher court, and late last year Chief Justice Chase T. Rogers accepted Anderson’s appeal.
Briefs filed at the Supreme Court by Anderson’s public defender, Monte P. Radler, argue that Anderson cannot be confined to prison because Northern is not able to provide the mental health treatment that Anderson needs and to which he is entitled under state law.
Keeping Anderson in prison, Radler said, is compounding the damage that incarceration has done to Anderson, whose time in prison dates to when he was a teenager.
“The state action in this case … sets a dangerous new precedent of dubious constitutionality, which ought to be reviewed given the possibility that the state may resort to this truncated procedure more commonly as an accepted means to deal with mentally ill ‘assaultive patients’ at Connecticut Valley Hospital or any other psychiatric inpatient facility,” Radler wrote in a court brief.
“Incarceration of the legally insane without the full protection of procedural due process tailored to the particular circumstances, defies modern notions of human decency.”
In a friend-of-the-court brief, the state Office of Protection and Advocacy for Persons with Disabilities backs Radler’s arguments, saying that Northern cannot provide the treatment that Anderson needs for his mental illnesses.
“Mr. Anderson should be returned to [Whiting], an institution whose very purpose is to provide treatment ordered by the court,” Nancy Alisberg, managing attorney for the protection and advocacy office, said in a court filing.
A spokesperson with the state Department of Correction would not confirm whether Anderson was receiving mental health treatment at Northern, citing confidentiality rules regarding medical information about inmates.
In state court filings, Nancy L. Walker, deputy assistant state’s attorney, disagrees that Anderson’s rights were violated when Gold imposed the bond. In briefs filed with the court — supported by a friend-of-the-court brief from the National Crime Victim Law Institute, a nonprofit organization at Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, Ore. — Walker argues that the safety of victims is a constitutional concern that must be weighed in setting conditions of release.
In her brief, Walker includes details about the attacks that Anderson is charged with at Whiting, including an assault on a patient on Dec. 30, 2013, in which Anderson “grabbed another patient he thought was disrespectful, slammed him against the radiator, and punched him in the head and neck, causing him to lose consciousness.”
On Feb. 8, 2014, Anderson pulled security mirrors from the walls, smashed them and threw a large glass piece toward a staff member, telling a nurse, “I’m going to kill you,” Walker wrote.
In its brief, the National Crime Victim Law Institute said that although it is “undeniable that defendants have important constitutional rights at stake with respect to bail proceedings … it is equally important to recognize that victims possess constitutional rights that are on par with those of the defendant.”
Anderson’s troubles with the law began when he was 11, and he has spent most of his life locked up in prison and in juvenile detention facilities.
He has been diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder. He has told doctors that he experienced significant trauma as a child, particularly when he was in a car accident at age 11 and went through a car windshield, according to security review board documents.
There are conflicting statements in the record of that alleged trauma. At one point, Anderson said that he witnessed domestic abuse between his mother and her boyfriend but later denied observing that behavior. Reports about whether he was sexually abused are also inconsistent. A more consistent record shows that Anderson’s mother handcuffed him to radiators and later abandoned him.
He dropped out of school in the ninth grade after a turbulent time as a student. He skipped class, used drugs and assaulted and cursed staff, leading to time in juvenile detention facilities, including Riverview at age 12 after he was arrested at 11 on larceny charges, according to review board documents.
From the age of 11 to 16, Anderson was arrested 11 more times for charges related to trespassing, burglary and robbery. At 17, he began an 18-year period of incarceration following a burglary case in which he was sentenced to prison for six years.
While in prison, he was charged with more crimes, including assaulting staff, and he often didn’t take his medication and refused to meet with mental health providers while writing letters to government officials alleging that he was not getting the care he needed.