MIAMI – The choose who sentenced a 37-yr-old gentleman to jail on a littering demand – two months in advance of he killed himself with a chainsaw on a do the job depth at a condition jail – is urging the Florida Legislature to consider action to deal with the rising crisis of needlessly positioning people with psychological illnesses in the criminal justice method.
“We need enable,” claimed retired judge Scott Cupp. “[People with mental illnesses] have to have enable. The technique just isn’t operating for these individuals. And it can be only going to get even worse. It can be only going to get even worse.”
CBS News Miami
In Could 2021, then Choose Cupp, who was a circuit court docket decide in Charlotte County, sentenced Tristin Murphy to a few decades in jail following Murphy, who was a diagnosed schizophrenic, rolled his pickup truck into a retention pond up coming to the Charlotte County Jail.
Murphy’s tale was the concentration of a latest CBS News Miami documentary, “Warehoused: The Lifestyle and Dying of Tristin Murphy,” which explored the cure of the mentally ill in the jails, courts and prisons.
Murphy’s circumstance, although sensational and grievous, is not exceptional and typifies the way jails and prisons are now utilized to warehouse individuals with mental illnesses.
In Murphy’s scenario, authorities who reviewed his arrest for littering argue Murphy’s steps of rolling his pickup into a pond subsequent to the jail must have been seen as a cry for support. Instead, Charlotte County deputies and the point out attorney, Amira Fox, billed Murphy with littering more than 500 kilos, which in Florida is a third-diploma felony. And simply because it transpired though he was on probation, Murphy was held in the Charlotte County Jail for nearly two several years in an isolation cell wherever his schizophrenia worsened.
Cupp mentioned he did not agree with the fees put against Murphy.
“I could say this now simply because I’m off the bench. Does it appear to be a little too much? Certainly, it does. Sure, it does,” Cupp mentioned. “Could there have been a different way to deal with that and cope with that? Absolutely.”
CBS Miami had initially contacted Cupp final yr, but at the time, he stated it would be inappropriate as a sitting choose to comment on the situation. But now that he has retired he is freer to converse out.
Cupp came in at the tail conclude of Tristin’s scenario immediately after other judges had been associated in conclusions about Tristin’s mental point out. Cupp was there to take Tristin’s guilty plea and sentence him.
“We can dissect why and what took place,” Cupp mentioned. “But at the finish of the working day, it isn’t going to you know, it appears trite, but it would not carry Tristan back to them. And I know that.”
Right after looking at the CBS documentary, Cupp began to publish Tristin’s mom and dad an electronic mail, expressing his sorrow, but then stopped.
“I didn’t know how they would get that and I did not want to make points worse,” he reported.
Questioned what he wishes the Murphy’s to know, Cupp claimed: “Just that as a father, as a fellow citizen, as a human being, how sorry I am for what they went by means of. I just want to inform them that I am sorry for their loss.”
“What they suffered by with their son, it hits really near to dwelling,” he added. “I have spouse and children customers that sad to say have endured with some very significant psychological overall health challenges. I have an plan what they went by means of. And it can be awful. It’s difficult.”
A person of the challenges exposed in our reporting was on competency restoration – the method exactly where a individual who is observed to be mentally incompetent is sent to a condition healthcare facility the place they are stabilized and then sent back again to court docket to practically often plead responsible.
“I never want to say it’s a joke which is far too cavalier, but it is not, it is really not helpful,” Cupp said. “It can be just maintaining the coach shifting. We have bought these scenarios. We have bought to deal with them. In concept, what you’re on the lookout for is shifting the instances, transferring the cases by means of the program. That’s what judges are, what we are paid to do. We do justice. But you also… you have acquired to go the scenarios or the complete technique backs up.”
There was a surprising second in the documentary in which Tristin Murphy’s father in fact expressed sorrow and sympathy for Cupp.
“It was not good to him to put that on his plate, that he understands he condemned a kid to loss of life for driving, for driving a truck in a pond,” Dennis Murphy reported in the documentary. “Jesus Christ, what is actually erroneous with our modern society?”
Viewing that moved Cupp deeply.
“Wow, just a extremely gracious and forgiving spirit,” he reported. “I do not know if he’s labored via the anger at all of us and for.”
Instructed Tristin’s mother nevertheless has that anger, Cupp responded: “I do not blame both a single of them.”
“From a qualified standpoint, I never know that I could have finished something in different ways that that appears it’s possible sounds a minimal chilly or cruel,” he explained. “From a private standpoint, it can be heartbreaking. You know, it’s just absolutely heartbreaking on so lots of unique degrees.”
