Grace Franklin Was Thrown in Jail After Her First Public Intox
Video Transcribed: Six months in jail for first offense public intox in Oklahoma. I’m Oklahoma attorney James Wirth, and we’re talking about an issue with people spending time in jail during pretrial detention longer than they perhaps should.
Specifically, we’re talking about the case of Grace Franklin, and essentially she had no prior criminal history whatsoever, gets picked up for a misdemeanor offense of public intox, that’s normally something that you wouldn’t get any jail time on at all. Sometimes just a fine, sometimes probation, be in and out.
However, in her case for her first offense charge picked up thrown in jail. The court determined on this misdemeanor that she lacked the capacity to be charged, that she had mental health issues that prevented her from understanding the proceedings, and therefore the court case could not move forward until those issues were resolved. Nonetheless, she stayed in custody without bonding out and was in this pretrial detention awaiting those medical services.
However, the way that it’s handled right now is that you have to wait to get into a state facility. In her case, it would have been the facility in Venita, and it takes approximately six months in order to get in there due to backlog.
So she was held in Steven County Jail for a period of time until to be transported to a state facility to get mental health treatment, to then be able to stand trial and then get her case taken care of, which normally would not have been any jail time at all. But because she was held in pretrial detention she ended up being in jail for six months. So that’s obviously problematic and an issue with the system.
This is a case that’s being reported on by The Frontier, and I think it’s important to get people’s attention that this is going on, that our tax dollars are being spent locking people up for minor misdemeanor offenses where they need mental health treatment but cannot get it because they’re waiting for a backlog to get into the state facility.
If you’ve got any case like this going on, have questions about how to deal with it and resolve it, you’re going to want to talk to an attorney specifically about your circumstances confidentially about that. To get that scheduled with somebody at my office you can go online to makelaweasy.com.
