INMATE IS UNSTABLE; THE SYSTEM IS JUST NUTS

Stephan Lilly's hands are cuffed behind him as he's led toward me
amid a chorus of deranged howls and mad pounding on cellblock doors
by other inmates. He sits on a plastic chair, his eyes glazed by the
meds he takes to silence the voices in his head, and asks quietly if
good behavior will reduce his sentence of 25 to life in half.

No, I tell him. It doesn't work that way in a three-strikes case.

His gaze turns inward and after a moment he says:

"That makes me feel like my life's over already."

In the Middle Ages, the mentally ill were often manacled and beaten.
In some respects, we are not much further along today.

Lilly, 42, will soon be shipped out of Twin Towers, the Los Angeles
County Jail that has roughly 2,000 inmates with mental problems.
He'll end up somewhere in the California prison system, which has
34,000 mental cases.

It will take some luck for him to survive in prison, where his
instability is likely to put him in harm's way. Because of runaway
overcrowding and a shortage of mental health services, there's no
guarantee he'll get treatment for severe mental illness that dates
back to his teenage years, when he started having delusions and hearing voices.

A few months ago, I met with officials of the Los Angeles County
public defender's office and asked a couple of questions: Are they
flooded with cases involving mentally ill clients whose conditions
obviously contributed to their crimes? And in such cases, are they
frustrated by the failure of the court to fully take mental illness
into account?

Dozens of examples were instantly offered up, but the Lilly case was
particularly troubling. Lilly had refused an offer from the district
attorney of 11 years in prison for two felony charges -- an assault
and a criminal threat.

No thanks, he said, arguing that he thought his crimes were
relatively minor. The charges stemmed from a scuffle with a security
guard at a North Hollywood group home for released inmates with
histories of mental illness and addiction.

L.A. County Deputy Public Defender Donna Tryfman thought it was clear
that Lilly's mental illness was largely responsible for his problems
with the law. In 1997, he was convicted of assaulting his wife with a
pipe. In 2005, a criminal threat against his wife went down on the
books as strike two.

Now he was looking at a third strike in the security guard case,
which also took place in 2005, and Tryfman warned Lilly that he could
go away for most or all of the rest of his life if convicted.

He insisted on going to trial.

An attorney can argue in court that a defendant isn't competent to
stand trial. But experience had taught Tryfman that even people with
severe mental illness were often considered capable of understanding
criminal proceedings. Lilly, she thought, wouldn't meet the standard,
and so the case went to a jury trial last month before Superior Court
Judge Richard Goul.

The key witness at the trial was the victim, a guard named Jaime
Dominguez, who worked at L.A. Family Housing. Lilly had just moved
there after his release from the mental health division of Twin
Towers, where he was serving time on the threat against his wife.
According to Dominguez, Lilly cussed him out and then attacked him
after being told to stop running.

Dominguez testified that Lilly slammed him against a wall several
times, lifted him off his feet and threatened to kill him. His
injuries were not serious enough to require medical attention, but
Dominguez testified that he was terrified -- and who wouldn't be? He
called the police and Lilly was arrested.

As her key witness, Tryfman called Barry Mir-Motahari, who had been
Lilly's case manager. His testimony covered many of the same points
he had made in a May 18 letter to the court on behalf of Lilly. In
that letter, Mir-Motahari described how Lilly was "a diagnosed
schizophrenic" who had been hearing voices and had been trying
unsuccessfully to get medication at the time he attacked Dominguez.

Dominguez had been thrown into a situation that someone with
experience could easily have defused, Mir-Motahari said. But
unfortunately, the guard had "little or no experience dealing with
dually diagnosed, mentally ill or homeless populations."

He added:

"I humbly beg the court to take into consideration the mitigating
circumstances when sentencing is handed down."

His plea fell on deaf ears.

The jury didn't buy the argument for assault with a deadly weapon
(Mr. Lilly's hands), convicting him of the lesser crime of simple
assault. But he was also convicted of making a criminal threat, and
prosecutor Angela Brunson argued for a sentence of 25 to life,
despite having made the pretrial offer of 11 years.

"The defendant is a violent, deviant criminal offender who does not
deserve to be out on the streets," Brunson wrote in a sentencing
memo. She noted that Lilly's criminal record stretched back to 1981
and included a conviction for aiding and abetting in an assault,
driving while impaired, possession of a controlled substance and
misdemeanor battery.

Tryfman argued that since the jury had reduced the assault charge to
a misdemeanor, Judge Goul should use his discretion to make the
criminal threat a misdemeanor as well. Tryfman also asked him to
consider using his authority to eliminate the prior strikes so that
the latest conviction wouldn't be strike three.

After both sides had made their arguments, Lilly was allowed to
address the judge.

"I wanted to -- I -- I wanted to request to go to Patton," he said,
or to the court that determines whether a defendant is competent to
stand trial, "because I'm hearing voices and seeing patterns of pictures."

Judge Goul:

"Mr. Lilly, you seem very self-aware at this time.... I think you
have a full understanding of what's going on right now before us. I'm
going to deny that motion at this time."

Goul announced from the bench that he would count the conviction on
the criminal threat as a third strike, and then came the sentence: 25 to life.

"The reason for this is the accelerating conduct of violence by the
defendant," he said.

Tryfman was floored.

"I audibly gasped," she said.

Two of Lilly's three strikes were crimes of words, she said,
including this last one. She called the scuffle with the guard
"misdemeanor conduct," and said for the first time in her career, a
sentence reduced her to tears.

"It was outrageous to me. Completely unreasonable and completely
unjustified, and the judge was cold as a cucumber when he did it."

Goul begged to differ.

In an interview Thursday, he told me he did not doubt that Lilly had
mental issues, nor does he doubt that with many such defendants,
"their mental condition was a factor in their ending up in the court
process." He called the Lilly case troubling, and wondered whether
society has "adequately taken care of people who, through no fault of
their own, have mental illnesses and lack the means to address those
illnesses."

And yet he said a criminal courtroom was not the place to address
such issues. In the end, he concluded Lilly was "a danger to
society," so he ordered his removal.

"Oh, Lordy," screamed Sharon Fountain, Lilly's sister, when I called
her in North Carolina to say her brother was on his way to prison for
at least 25 years. The family had been out of touch with him for years.

I asked if she knew whether her brother had ever been diagnosed with
mental illness. Absolutely, she said, describing how he started
having problems in his mid-teens. Fountain said he hallucinated,
talked to ghosts and got into arguments. His mother took him to
psychiatrists, and as a young man he qualified for Social Security
disability because of his condition.

I later talked to three other siblings who told much the same story.

Fountain said she would begin trying to dig up records of his mental
history, hoping it would help in the expected appeal of his conviction.

And what of the thousands of others on the same track as Lilly? The
story of our inhumanity toward the mentally ill has been well
documented, and despite the huge challenges of such terrible
diseases, it's not as if we don't know how to do better.

Look, I don't want to diminish Lilly's crimes or the fear he has
struck in his victims. But it seems preposterous that he and
countless others go on trial with virtually no consideration given to
the demons that led to the violence. The defense of "diminished
capacity" used to address that very reality, and although it was
abused, some refined form of it seems appropriate.

As for other solutions, it's not as if we don't know what works.

Permanent supportive housing can be an effective strategy for ending
cycles of crime and despair, but there's far too little of it. In
mental health courts, where the obvious is taken into consideration
rather than ignored, the sentence for madness is treatment rather
than punishment. But there are too few of those, too.

And so the streets, the jails and the prisons gather and warehouse
our indifference, serving as last-resort asylums and costing
taxpayers a fortune. We're tough on crime, no matter the cost, and
without regard to the well-being of thousands of inmates with
biochemical brain disorders.

When I talked to Lilly at Twin Towers, inmates were being led out of
their cells one by one and chained to metal tables, where they stared
into space. Lilly told me he sometimes gets down on his knees in his
cell and cries. He's not allowed to read, he said, because he could
kill himself with a book, and he's actually thought about it.

How would he kill himself with a book? I asked.

"Eat the pages and gag," he said.

As I left, he asked me to let his family know he was alive.

The howls and the pounding followed me out the door.