A board charged with overseeing Oklahoma’s legal settlements rejected a landmark deal to address systemic mental health issues in the state’s county jails.
The rejection intensifies tensions between Gov. Kevin Stitt and Attorney General Gentner Drummond as hundreds of people in jail continue to wait for court-ordered mental health services.
The consent decree at the heart of the settlement has been debated for months. Drummond and attorneys for the case’s plaintiffs drafted a five-year plan establishing a 21-day maximum wait time for the state to provide restoration services to a county jail detainee deemed incompetent by a court. It was preliminarily approved by a federal judge in September.
During Tuesday’s Contingency Review Board meeting, Speaker of the House Charles McCall, R-Atoka, voted against the decree along with Stitt, siding soundly with Oklahoma’s Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services Director Allie Friesen.
After she accepted Stitt’s appointment to the Mental Health Department, Friesen became one of the main defendants of the case.
An hour before Tuesday’s meeting, she sent a termination letter to Drummond saying she plans to seek new representation in his place.
“The core of the issue,” Friesen said in the meeting, “is the horrific misrepresentation of what is in the best interest of the department.”
Drummond said his client is not the department.
“My client is the State of Oklahoma, not the government agency that put us in this indefensible position,” Drummond said in a written statement. “With all due respect to the commissioner, she cannot fire me — just as she did not hire me. My responsibility is to the people of our state.”
Drummond was not at Tuesday’s Contingency Review Board meeting, despite being summoned. For the second time, he called its efforts “premature.”
‘Non-negotiables’
During the meeting, Friesen said Drummond has refused to address multiple points of the consent decree she deems “non-negotiable.” Friesen repeatedly said the agreement, as written, would force the department to “cease treatments in 75 of 77 counties across the state.”
The final voting member of the board, Senate President Pro Tem Greg Treat, R-Oklahoma City, asked Friesen to provide the basis for her claim. Friesen and her counsel struggled to do so, stating they had not yet been provided the final version of the agreement.
A lack of time to review the latest version of the document, along with Drummond’s absence from the meeting, caused Treat to abstain from voting.
“I just want to make sure that if I'm making a decision,” Treat said, “I'm making it ‘eyes wide open.’”
Stitt and McCall remained resolute in their distaste for the consent decree. To their point, Friesen went so far as to say she’d “rather resign” before signing it.
“This is $100 million with no end in sight, at a minimum, that it could cost the taxpayers,” Stitt said before casting his vote. “I have no idea why we would be jumping to such reckless conclusions.”
Paul DeMuro, an attorney representing the plaintiffs in the case, said Friesen would not be able to back up her “non-negotiables” because she and her team were participating in the “willful trafficking of misinformation.”
Her team declined to provide members of its legal counsel for comment.
“When you read the document,” DeMuro said, “it becomes obvious to anyone with an eighth-grade education that this consent decree allows the department to provide whatever mental health services and medications they think they're required to provide to people in jail, including services under the competency restoration statute.”
DeMuro said the settlement contains three provisions legally requiring competency restoration services from the department, striking Friesen’s complaints.
“You've got to stop lying to people and telling people you have a statewide jail restoration program because you don't,” he said of Friesen. “That's a sham, and we've got to do a pilot program to get best practices.”
Simmering animosity
DeMuro said the board’s vote to reject the consent decree has deeper implications.
“Hundreds of people are suffering as a result of this bad faith political infighting,” he said.
For her part, Friesen agreed the battle is a political distraction.
“There is so much work that has to be done in this department, but 95% of my time, sadly, has been occupied with this,” Friesen said. “And I think that that's a purposeful thing to interfere with our ability to make progress.”
She said without the consent decree, she could correct the department’s mistakes.
“A lot of this our department is already doing for zero additional taxpayer dollars,” Friesen said in the meeting. “That's been our ‘ask’ all along – let us do this with Oklahoma experts, because Oklahomans deserve Oklahoma experts to design their care.”
But DeMuro disagrees.
“You can’t wave a wand and say it suddenly exists in 77 counties when previously it never existed,” DeMuro said. “So the intent here was to say, ‘look, you got to stop the lie and do a pilot program.’ But in the meantime, we're not stopping you from providing, on a case by case basis, restoration services to any class member in any county jail.”
Despite significant disagreement about how to move forward, all parties involved, including the governor, Friesen, district attorneys and law enforcement, say the system is deeply flawed and needs a comprehensive solution.
This report was produced by the Oklahoma Public Media Exchange, a collaboration of public media organizations. Help support collaborative journalism by donating at the link at the top of this webpage.
