[Peace-discuss] Donnell Clemons found Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity

[Stuart Levy]

After Donnell Clemons' hearing this morning, Marti Wilkinson
passed along this N-G article (to the CUCPJ mailing list):

On Thu, Jan 10, 2008 at 11:38:02AM -0600, Marti Wilkinson wrote:
>   Man who shot at police found not guilty by reason of insanity
> By Mary Schenk
> <http://www.news-gazette.com/news/reporter/mschenk/>
> Thursday January 10, 2008
> 
> URBANA — A Champaign County judge this morning found a man who shot at
> Champaign police officers last summer near a city park in Champaign,
> wounding three of them, not guilty of attempted murder by reason of
> insanity.
> 
> Donnell Clemons, 47, who was homeless at the time of his June 7 arrest, will
> now go to a secure mental health facility maintained by the Illinois
> Department of Human Services. He cannot be held any longer than the maximum
> amount of time he faced in prison for the crimes – 40 to 100 years.
> 
> Judge Heidi Ladd acquitted Clemons after reviewing reports submitted by the
> state's attorney's office and his public defender. Those reports included
> the opinion of Champaign psychiatrist Dr. Lawrence Jeckel that Clemons has
> long suffered from chronic schizophrenia and could not appreciate the
> criminality of his conduct.
> ------------------------------
> Find this article at:
> http://www.news-gazette.com/news/2008/01/10/champaign_county_judge_finds_man_who_shot_at_police
> 
> <http://www.news-gazette.com/>
> 
> Contents of this site are (c) Copyright 2008 The News-Gazette, Inc.
> All rights reserved.


This sounds like good news, on balance.  At least he'll be out of
reach of local police.

Does anyone know about procedures at the secure mental health facility?
For example, can Donnell's family visit him there?  Would he get
treatment for other medical problems (apparently he still has at
least some bullet fragments in him)?  If he responds well to treatment,
might he be released sooner than "40 to 100 years"?

I've been trying to find a reference to (the? a?) facility on the
DHS web pages ( http://www.dhs.state.il.us/ ).  It sounds as though
(a? the?) state psychiatric hospital is the place they mean;
the Chester Mental Health Center, associated with SIU's psychiatry dept.,
is "the state's maximum security forensic hospital ... has 280 beds for
patients referred from the criminal courts ...  Services offered
include pharmacotherapy, individual and group psychotherapy,
and behavioral therapy."

    http://www.siumed.edu/psych/html/chester_mental_health.html

so maybe that's the place.

   Stuart