By Alaine Griffin
The Hartford Courant
HARTFORD — Each day Francis Anderson spends locked up in Connecticut’s super-maximum security prison is another day of “torture” for the criminally insane 45-year-old who has been in and out of jail since the age of 11, his attorney argued before the state Supreme Court Thursday.
A Superior Court judge’s decision to impose a $100,000 bond on Anderson, which resulted in his return to Northern Correctional Institution prison in Somers last summer, has deprived Anderson of his right to appropriate psychiatric treatment afforded to him after he was found not guilty by reason of insanity in 2013 of assaulting a correctional officer, Public Defender Monte P. Radler told the justices.
Anderson’s treatment “now consists of biweekly therapy sessions at the door of his jail cell,” Radler said — treatment “not even in the same universe” as treatment Anderson would get if he was still at Connecticut Valley Hospital’s Whiting Forensic Division in Middletown.
“What happened here makes no sense in terms of justice and the law,” Radler told the panel. “The law as it relates to insanity acquittees says that they get treatment, not punishment.”
Superior Court Judge David P. Gold’s imposition of the bond made perfect sense, said Deputy Assistant State’s Attorney Nancy L. Walker, arguing for the state.
“Judge Gold did what a judge is supposed to do in this situation,” Walker said. Gold balanced Anderson’s interest with those of the patients and staff members Anderson is accused of assaulting. She said the safety of victims is a constitutional concern that must be weighed in setting conditions of release.
The judge “also considered the interests of the victims, many of whom are here today,” Walker said.
Anderson was not present at Thursday’s hearing, which nearly two dozen Whiting employees, concerned that Anderson is too violent for the facility, attended. Legal observers believe the case has no controlling precedent in Connecticut.
The violent attacks involving Anderson and other patients and staff are detailed in court and Psychiatric Security Review Board records. The
records say Anderson held a patient who was vandalizing his room by the neck and threw him into a hallway, assaulted a patient who was using the toilet, and pushed and slapped another one in a separate incident. That patient was hospitalized with injuries after Anderson picked him up and “rammed him multiple times into the radiator.”
The records show Anderson also has injured staff members, damaged property and hurt himself while at Whiting. In a recent letter sent to The Courant, Anderson said he was harming himself at Northern. Keeping Anderson in prison, Radler said, is compounding the damage that incarceration has done to him.
Anderson was committed to Whiting, Connecticut Valley Hospital’s maximum-security unit, in 2013 for 10 years, after a lifetime of incarceration dating to when he was a teen. But in less than a year there, Anderson was arrested in connection with the attacks, prompting Gold to take the unusual step of setting bail for Anderson during an arraignment in August on a charge of assault of a public safety officer/health care personnel.
Gold said he wanted to ensure that Anderson would be in the custody of the Department of Correction — not at Whiting — while his cases were adjudicated, for the safety of both patients and staff at the hospital. Anderson appealed Gold’s ruling to the Supreme Court.
Though Radler spoke Thursday of inadequate treatment for Anderson, the justices noted that no evidentiary hearing about specific treatment for Anderson was ever held.
Gold planned to hold such a hearing last July after Anderson’s seventh arrest at Whiting but the case was continued and Anderson was arrested again.
Justice Dennis G. Eveleigh asked Walker if Gold had considered having Anderson held at Garner Correctional Institution in Newtown where the state since 2004 has consolidated inmates with mental illness and created specialized care for them.
Walker said the Department of Corrections, not judges, decides where inmates are held.
Justices also asked Radler and Walker about Anderson’s right to mental-health treatment and questioned why Connecticut does not have a law on the books that could give Whiting guidance when it gets a patient it can not handle.
The justices did not rule on the matter by late Thursday.