Governor pulls bill to expand involuntary treatment

SANTA FE — Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has scrapped a proposal for debate at next month’s special session that was intended to expand court-supervised outpatient treatment for people with mental illness.

A substitute proposal presented to lawmakers this week would broaden eligibility for someone who could be ordered by a judge into involuntary mental health treatment.

One lawmaker responded that a shortage of behavioral health treatment options is an underlying problem that makes any changes in law difficult to enforce.

“We don’t really have any facilities in our area to treat anybody except as an outpatient,” Rep. Andrea Reeb, R-Clovis, said after hearing the new proposal.

Reeb, a prosecutor in the 9th Judicial District, said she recently had difficulty finding in-patient treatment for a serial arsonist in her district.

“You can divert people all you want to different things, but you don’t have places to send them,” she said.

Lujan Grisham has announced she will call legislators into a special session on July 18 to address public safety issues.

The bill the governor withdrew this week was intended to strengthen a 2016 law that allows district judges to order involuntary treatment for people with severe mental illness who have frequent brushes with law enforcement.

It would have required each of the state’s 13 judicial districts to create a program called Assisted Outpatient Treatment, or AOT, overseen by a civil court judge.

Holly Agajanian, the governor’s chief general counsel, told lawmakers that the governor was responding to concerns from legislators that the AOT bill was a “big lift” for a special session.

“What we’ve decided instead to do is condense the goals here,” Agajanian told members of the interim Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee.

A substitute measure would take “small, necessary steps to help those people who are either a true danger to themselves or an extreme danger to others,” Agajanian said Wednesday.

The Governor’s Office proposes instead to broaden eligibility for involuntary commitment by tweaking definitions in existing law.

The existing involuntary commitment law essentially limits commitment to people who are suicidal, Agajanian said.

The proposed change would broaden the definition of “harm to self” and “harm to others” to cover more people eligible for involuntary treatment.

Under the new definition, “harm to self” would include a person unable “to exercise self-control, judgment and discretion in the conduct of the person’s daily responsibilities and social relations” or “to satisfy the person’s need for nourishment, personal or medical care,” housing and personal safety.

The proposed definition of “harm to others” would cover a person who “has inflicted, attempted to inflict or threatened to inflict serious bodily harm on another” or has taken actions that create “a substantial risk of serious bodily harm to another.”

Harm to others could also apply to someone who has engaged in “extreme destruction of property” in the recent past.

The governor has also proposed a criminal competency bill that would place certain requirements on judges and prosecutors when a criminal defendant is found incompetent to stand trial and charges are dismissed.

The proposed bill would require district attorneys to file a petition seeking involuntary civil commitment for certain criminal defendants who are found incompetent to stand trial.

The requirement would apply to people charged with serious violent felonies or crimes that involve the use of a firearm. It would also apply to people who had been found incompetent to stand trial at least twice before.

Judges would be required to order the person jailed for up to seven days while a petition for involuntary commitment is filed.