Marion judge embroiled in troubled mental health system struggles to protect public safety

The 31-year-old man had overstayed his welcome at Oregon’s mental hospital in Salem.

After reaching the state facility’s time limit in November 2023, he was moved to a non-secure treatment center. There, he was supposed to get help with his mental illness. He also struggled with addiction.

In April, he was found dead in his room. The man’s relatives haven’t learned how he died.

His death weighs heavily on the judge who ordered him into treatment.

Until this year, Audrey Broyles’ job was unlike any other judge in Marion County.

She is tasked with deciding the fate of the county’s most mentally ill people charged with crimes. It’s a responsibility she now shares with several other judges.

Broyles recently has confronted a powerful federal judge who in 2022 restricted how long people can stay at Oregon State Hospital in Salem, regardless of whether their condition has improved. 

Broyles and her colleagues have to decide daily whether to release violent, mentally ill people back into the community or violate their rights by leaving them to languish in jail without treatment.

Since the federal order, four patients in Marion County who have timed out of the state hospital and been released later died by suspected overdose. Dozens more have overdosed but survived.

During that time, the hospital has released 88 Marion County defendants who weren’t found able to assist in their defense. Of those, 35 went on to be charged with new crimes or have warrants filed for their arrest because they violated release conditions.

There are no good choices, Broyles said. The result is deteriorating community safety and a revolving door of serious offenders who are left untreated.

“These are the kinds of cases that keep me up at night,” she said.

“An untenable decision”

Broyles’ experience has put her at the center of Oregon’s floundering mental health system.

There is almost no way for her to order someone to get care at the state hospital unless they have pending criminal charges.

The hospital is the highest rung on the ladder of psychiatric care offered in Oregon. It’s intended for people with severe and persistent mental illness.

Only a “minutely small percentage” of people who need treatment at the hospital qualify to get it without committing a crime, according to Broyles.

Broyles has taken an extraordinary step for a sitting judge to publicly speak outside of comments from the bench.

She reached out to Salem Reporter about the new federal rules, which she said have created a public safety crisis in the Salem area and across Oregon that the average citizen isn’t aware of. People don’t understand who is being released into their community or why state judges can’t do anything about it, she said.

Every Thursday, Broyles holds around 15 to 25 hearings lasting up to an hour to decide whether people charged with crimes can receive mental health treatment in the community. Most have timed out of the state hospital, and the alternative is dismissing their criminal charges altogether.

Community restoration is not treatment, according to Broyles. Instead, it focuses on legal skills and managing medication so that defendants can help their attorney and understand court proceedings.

Such facilities in Oregon are overrun with patients. Many are not secure, and restoration providers also often don’t take the most aggressive patients or those with addictions.

The only other option is jail. Broyles said that often leaves people decompensating and their rights violated as they sit in custody without getting the treatment they need. Defense attorneys have successfully challenged placing mentally ill defendants in jail, resulting in their charges being dismissed.

“We’re now forced with an untenable decision,” she said.

Learning the system

Broyles graduated from Willamette University College of Law in 1988 and joined the Marion County District Attorney’s Office as a deputy district attorney for four years.

She then spent 11 years as a senior prosecutor in the Thurston County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office in Washington, where many of the criminal cases she worked on involved mental illness.

Starting in 2005, she worked for four years as a temporary judge in Linn County’s specialized domestic violence court.

Broyles came to Marion County in 2009 and worked as a hearings referee and temporary judge. That included committing people to the state hospital who had no criminal charges. 

At the time, around one in three patients were sent to the hospital outside the criminal justice system, because a judge deemed the patient a danger to themself or others, or unable to provide for basic personal needs. 

Such commitments have mostly eroded. Generally, the only path to intensive treatment at the hospital is by being charged with a crime.

Broyles’ experiences taught her that mental health issues should be considered in criminal cases throughout the court process and at sentencing.

“They are sometimes faced with unique challenges and barriers, and so it just was something that resonated with me,” she said. 

She was elected to the bench in 2016 and began overseeing Marion County’s mental health specialty court. 

Tall task

Now, Broyles oversees many of the county’s criminal cases involving people with behavioral health issues.

In such cases, judges often order people to seek treatment at the state hospital, which cares for around 500 people with mental illnesses and disabilities. 

People unable to assist their lawyers in their defense against criminal charges are supposed to receive treatment at the hospital so that they can participate in the justice system and understand their legal rights and responsibilities. They are referred to more commonly as “aid-and-assist” patients.

Other patients are awaiting evaluations to determine whether they can stand trial or have been found guilty except for insanity.

The hospital in recent years has grown overcrowded, with people across Oregon waiting months in county jails when they are supposed to be getting treatment. 

An order intended to help clear that logjam has instead shifted the problem to local governments and their communities, according to Broyles.

U.S. District Judge Michael Mosman in September 2022 set deadlines for how long aid-and-assist patients can stay at the state hospital.

Oregon law allows such patients to stay at the hospital for up to three years for a felony. 

But under Mosman’s order, patients have to be released from the state hospital after 90 days if facing misdemeanor charges, six months for certain felonies and one year for the most violent crimes. 

If a criminal defendant has reached their time limit at the state hospital, they won’t be allowed back under Mosman’s order. That’s unless they are charged with a new crime. 

That was the case when a man with a lifelong history of mental illness did a stint at the hospital, went to community restoration and was sent back to jail after relapsing on drugs, which violated his release conditions. His behavior grew more extreme, including smearing feces around the jail.

“Why does the jail have to put up with an inmate who should be at the state hospital?” Broyles said. She dismissed the man’s charges and released him from jail. 

Five days later, he set fire to his mobile home in an RV park. Only then was he sent back to the state hospital.

In a state “that thinks it’s so progressive and talks about decriminalizing mental illness, we are like the poster child for, ‘You have to commit a crime to get any services,’” Broyles said.

The case of a man with schizophrenia who walked onto the Highland Elementary School playground last June and randomly attacked two educators during recess prompted Broyles to get creative.

After six months at the state hospital, Charly J. Velasquez-Sanchez, 27, returned to jail in February, still mentally ill.

That was when Broyles fashioned an unusual court order. She told the Marion County Sheriff’s Office to take Velasquez-Sanchez once a week to the state hospital for treatment during the day and then bring him back to jail.

But hospital officials promptly filed to get the matter to Mosman, who shut down the idea. The federal judge found the plan violated his deadlines for the state facility.

Eventually, Broyles said she released Velasquez-Sanchez to a non-secure residential treatment facility and placed him on house arrest with GPS monitoring. She sent him there to avoid the other alternative of dropping the charges altogether.

The Highland attack case is an example of the problems that the federal court order has created for state judges like Broyles.

The move was intended to get the state hospital to comply with a 2002 federal order that required it to admit aid-and-assist patients within seven days.

Mosman’s order in 2022 came after mediation that included advocacy group Disability Rights Oregon and Metropolitan Public Defender, which provides criminal defense for people who can’t afford a lawyer.

Tom Stenson, deputy legal director for Disability Rights Oregon, said the federal order has been “an easy scapegoat for people who don’t want to grapple with the very serious issues in Oregon.”

“The issue is there’s a finite number of beds in the state hospital, and a lot of people who are being referred there without adequate community resources,” Stenson said. “If Judge Mosman didn’t exist and (Disability Rights Oregon) didn’t exist, this hospital would still be full of people who are charged with crimes, who are unable to aid and assist their attorneys.”

Mosman did not respond to an email seeking comment on the impacts the order has had on local judges and public safety.

State officials, legislators and others in recent years have recognized the serious lack of mental health services throughout Oregon.

Outside the state hospital, the number of Marion County patients in community restoration has roughly tripled since the Mosman order without expanded services, according to Broyles. That can include adult foster homes, residential treatment facilities and a few secure treatment facilities across the state.

Allan Rainwater, a clinical supervisor with Marion County Health and Human Services, said at a June 13 court hearing that around 20 to 25 people at a time were receiving community restoration in the county before the Mosman order. There are now between 50 and 75 people.

“We just have a lot of people in places that we probably wouldn’t authorize otherwise, but we’re desperate to have some kind of supervision of them,” Broyles said.

Meantime, Broyles said the federal judge has removed the hospital’s duty to care for people with serious mental illness.

“He basically shifted the blame and the responsibility onto innocent communities, really, who are unsuspecting of what this means,” she said.

Broyles says there is no factual reason behind the deadlines. They don’t consider that a misdemeanor offender, such as a serial stalker, may be more dangerous than someone charged with a felony such as stealing a vehicle, she said.

“It doesn’t take into account the person’s history, their responsivity to treatment, their dangerousness, their social supports,” she said.

Patients who time out of the hospital under such conditions are sometimes moved to lower-level  treatment facilities in the community and eventually kicked out because their symptoms are too severe. In other cases, they are sent back to jail after being accused of new crimes. 

Those who are too dangerous for restoration are often returned to jail, where they don’t get the hospital-level care that they need. That makes it impossible to set a trial. 

“Warehousing them without treatment in the jail can only last so long while the DA tries to find a secure residential treatment facility,” Broyles said. “We have only a handful in the state and there is a huge waitlist.  If the defense attorney moves to dismiss because the defendant is stuck in this neverland, the only option the court has is to dismiss or put a person out in the community who shouldn’t be out there.”

Broyles said that’s a disservice to crime victims and the community.

“There will be no closure, there will be no accountability. This person, if it’s dismissed, will just be out there,” she said. “By the same token, that person is just out alone. They’re not rehabilitated, they’re still ill, they’re using controlled substances, they’re likely to have law enforcement contact.”

Broyles said she and several other state judges formed a group to advise the federal judge about how the deadlines could impact large and small counties across Oregon.

Days before Mosman’s order, they argued that his impending order would violate state law and that he hadn’t considered alternatives.

At a federal court hearing in August 2022, Mosman said that the state judges would need to wait to make their case.

“I’d want to hear that further down the line, January or something like that, after this has played out for a while and you have had a chance to see whether your potential parade of horribles also pans out or not,” he said.

Broyles left the group last year after finding that they were not advising as much as they were irritating the federal judge.

“I didn’t see the point,” she said. “It was an exercise in futility.”

Failed by the system

In summer 2023, judges in Marion and Polk counties considered the fate of Jazmine L. Lawson, who was accused in separate cases of stealing a vehicle, damaging property and trying to break into a house.

Lawson spent several months at the state hospital before reaching the federal deadline. 

In March, she was ordered to stay in a non-secure treatment facility in Salem. She was supposed to appear two weeks later in Broyles’ courtroom.

Within days, Lawson died of a suspected overdose at 25 years old.

All of Lawson’s recent evaluations made clear that she wouldn’t be successful in the community, according to Broyles. She described Lawson’s death as pointless. Then came the case of Daniel A. Garcia, a 31-year-old Keizer man who had addiction and mental illness.

During a foot chase in September 2022, a Salem police officer deployed a Taser and Garcia fell, cracking his head on the concrete. The episode resulted in Garcia spending around 10 days unconscious in Salem Hospital before being moved to the county jail. 

Broyles eventually committed him to the state hospital. But after about six months, he was released under the Mosman order and sent to an adult foster home.

Four months later, he was found dead in his room. The Marion County Medical Examiner’s office did not respond to a voicemail or emails asking what caused his death. 

“These weigh very heavy on me,” Broyles said. 

“How is it in their best interest that they get kicked out of the hospital prematurely, get kicked out of jail and are on the streets and succumb either to new crimes or victimization?,” she said. “Every time we let somebody out prematurely and they relapse, either because they’re not on medication or they have a relapse on controlled substances, or both, it’s going to be that much more difficult to get them to the place that they were before they were not stabilized.”

Broyles said she feels a personal duty to protect Salem residents, as well as the defendants that come before her.

“It makes me angry that people have lost their life,” she said. “It’s kind of demoralizing, because I embrace my job. I love my job. But this is the very worst part of it, is not being able to do my job.”

Contact reporter Ardeshir Tabrizian: [email protected] or 503-929-3053.

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