From the BBC, the [UK] Times:

Prosecutors in Scotland have apologized to the family of a teenager with Down syndrome for charging him with a racially motivated assault on an Asian student. The parents of Jamie Bauld, 19, are calling for changes in how law enforcement authorities treat people with intellectual disabilities.

The charges arose out of an incident in September in the special needs department at Motherwell College, in which Jamie pushed another student who had been following him.

His parents, Fiona and Jim Bauld, said they had been through a seven-month ordeal with the legal system over what they described as a minor fracas between two youngsters with learning disabilities. They said their son agreed with everything the police said, even though he did not understand the charges against him.

They believe that he was a victim of the zero-tolerance policy on racism under which police have to respond to any complaint, however minor.

Experts in Down syndrome say that the case shows insensitivity and is an example of bureaucracy gone mad.

The stories describe Jamie as having “a mental age of five.”

Associated Press story in the Houston Chronicle:

More than 800 employees at Texas’ 13 large facilities for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities have been suspended or fired for abusing residents since fiscal year 2004, state officials said Tuesday in response to an open records request from the Associated Press.

… The revelations come a month after Gov. Rick Perry’s office confirmed that the civil rights department at the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating allegations of abuse and neglect at the Denton State School, the state’s largest with about 650 residents. It’s at least the second such investigation into state facilities, including one at the Lubbock State School in 2006 that revealed widespread abuse.

An advocate for people with disabilities called the number of employees disciplined “stunning.”

“It indicates to me that there is clearly a culture of abuse or neglect in these facilities,” said Jeff Garrison-Tate, president of San Antonio-based Community Now. “The bottom line is people are getting really injured, and they are not safe,” he said.

Georgia must fund team approach for troubled defendants

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

The editors take the state of Georgia to task for failing to provide adequate support for community health care. The result, they say, is a systemic failure of the community mental health system that causes people with mental illness to end up incarcerated in state prisons and jails because they can’t get help anywhere else.

“Deinstitutionalization,” the movement to get patients out of state hospitals, has been around for about 40 years. But Georgia, like other states, has failed to ensure that severely mentally ill patients have access to the treatment they need in communities where they live. Little of the savings from scaling back care at hospitals was transferred to provide an adequate level of spending on community services, which 180,000 Georgians now depend on for basic mental health care.

… At a minimum, the state should consider a mental health budget at least equal to the annual corrections budget. Failure to upgrade mental health care means those same prisons will keep filling up with people whose only major crime is being mentally ill.

See earlier story here: Mentally ill strain Georgia prisons.

Volunteers will ticket cars illegally parked in wheelchair accessible spots

From the Oakland [Michigan] Press:

Macomb County Sheriff Mark Hackel has signed up 14 volunteers for his “Accessibility Compliance Enforcement” team. They will each be provided with a poice radio, ticket book and yellow vest with the word “sheriff” on it.

He says he is “looking for blatant violators of the handicap law.”

The vigilantes — oops, volunteers — will be instructed to back off if a vehicle owner becomes combative. And how will they figure out whether or not a vehicle owner has a disability? That’s anybody’s guess.

From the Dallas Morning News:

The U.S. Justice Department is conducting the second federal investigation into a Texas facility for people with disabilities within two years’ time.

Word of the inquiry has given advocates for the mentally disabled new ground to call for the closure of Texas’ 13 institutions. And it raises serious questions about how well the state reacted to a scathing 2006 Justice Department report on the Lubbock State School, those advocates and some state officials say.

… Officials with Texas’ Department of Aging and Disability Services say they’ve gone to great lengths to improve conditions at all their institutions since the Lubbock review, which revealed shoddy health care, mistreatment, and more than 17 deaths in an 18-month period.

… A Dallas Morning News investigation last year found hundreds of cases of confirmed abuse and horrific conditions at some of the worst facilities.

Earlier stories here and here and here.

Inmates should be getting community health services, task force says

By Andy Miller in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Inmates in Georgia’s prisons and jails are three times as likely to have a serious mental illness as members of the general public, according to a state task force led by the state’s Supreme Court chief justice.

The panel said the overrepresentation is caused by a lack of community mental health services, which causes people to get trapped in the criminal justice system instead of getting needed treatment. About fifteen percent of the population of the jails and prisons have illnesses like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression, compared with five percent of all Georgians.

(more…)

From the Sacramento Bee:

California lawmakers are considering granting special parking privileges to women in the final three months of pregnancy and the first two months after birth.

Assemblyman Chuck DeVore’s bill would qualify pregnant women for “temporarily disabled” parking placards from the Department of Motor Vehicles.

… Opponents of the new proposal, Assembly Bill 1940, say pregnant women should be exercising as much as possible and that the legislation could reduce parking for motorists with more serious disabilities.

(more…)