The group of North Carolina senators on Wednesday plans to review proposed changes to the state’s process for evaluating criminal suspects for mental illness — the next step in the bill’s journey to becoming law.
The Senate Healthcare Committee is scheduled to discuss House Bill 1104, which attempts to shift some mental evaluations out of emergency departments and expand the number of people who can conduct them. The bill would also allow more North Carolinians who are under involuntary commitment orders to undergo mental health treatment outside of psychiatric facilities.
The House passed the bill 100-10 earlier this month at the urging of state Rep. Tim Reeder, a Pitt County Republican and physician who wrote the legislation after holding multiple hearings on the state’s practices for treating criminal suspects who suffer from mental illness.
Reeder and others in the House began reviewing the state’s laws after the August death of Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian who moved to Charlotte in 2022 and was fatally stabbed on a city train. DeCarlos Brown, the man charged in her death, was deemed incapable of proceeding following a mental evaluation.
The General Assembly in October approved a judicial reform package titled “Iryna’s Law,” an attempt to keep more suspects in custody while awaiting trial. Brown had been arrested multiple times prior to Zarutska’s death.
However, legislators faced pushback for some of the new rules. For instance, hospital representatives took issue with a requirement for certain criminal defendants — who have undergone an involuntary commitment within three years of their arrest for a violent crime, or who judicial officials believe to be a danger to themselves or others — to be transported “to a hospital emergency department or other crisis facility” for a psychiatric evaluation.
Hospital leaders said they don’t want the suspects evaluated in emergency departments, fearing they could endanger patients and hospital staff. Hospital leaders said the evaluations should be conducted in jails — a suggestion Reeder incorporated into his bill.
House Speaker Destin Hall, R-Caldwell, created a committee to review the state’s involuntary commitment laws and appointed Reeder cochair. Reeder has said the group has identified a number of ways to improve the system.
Hall has said Reeder’s bill “will make our state safer by keeping dangerous criminals with mental illnesses off the streets and getting them the care they need before they can harm others.”
Democratic opponents of the bill criticized it for not doing more to bolster the state’s psychiatric facilities: Broughton Hospital, Central Regional Hospital, and Cherry Hospital.
The bill calls on the Department of Health and Human Services — which runs the state’s mental hospitals — to study why it has staffing shortages. Democratic lawmakers have blamed the shortages on low pay and competition from the private sector, calling on Republican lawmakers to approve big pay increases.