At a legislative hearing in December, Orange County Municipal Court Judge Pamela Iles described these two mentally ill men she had seen in her courtroom:

“Robert has organic brain damage. I have seen Robert on my short time on the bench approximately eight or nine times for minor offenses, often accompanied by failures to appear, because Robert can’t remember where the courthouse is. . . .

“We sent him to a residential treatment program in San Francisco, because they promised us they would take him. Because he had other problems and . . . his (medication) wore off, they took one look at him and Robert was not acceptable to the program.

“He hitchhiked his way back from San Francisco to my courthouse. He arrived in a tattered condition, no shoes, no jacket, it was the middle of the winter.

. . . He was disoriented; he was delusional; he was disorganized. I put him in jail. That was the only place I could put him in order to take care of him.

“Out of the last 24 months, Robert spent nine of those months in custody in the Orange County Jail. When those people are committed to local facilities, there is no therapeutic environment for them. They are usually not acceptable to any farm or ranch program. They stay in the bowels of the jail. . . . They are not getting any treatment; they are not getting any follow-up care and they are not amenable to mental health programs. . . .

“Robert doesn’t qualify for anything. So what we have is someone who falls through the cracks, and the crack that he falls into is custody.”

“Kenneth is a 19-year-old person who was arrested for sexually assaulting two boys, one 12 and one 9. Kenneth would go down to a riverbed alongside of a school and wait for children to come down to play in the attractiveness of the riverbed. When Kenneth got down there, he brought along with him a knife, a couple of long ropes, a couple of blindfolds, a soft tie to stuff in somebody’s mouth as a gag, and then he’d wait for the next child to come along. . . .

“Once he had his victims blindfolded, gagged, with their hands tied behind their back and their feet tied, he’d start to strangle them, and when they went into convulsions, then he would quickly feel someplace else, so that the child didn’t know that he was being sexually molested.

“This young man pled guilty to me to a battery and a false imprisonment on a plea bargain by the district attorney and his private lawyer, striking all of the sex allegations, so the case came to me with no sex allegations on the plea.”

(Based on a probation report that hinted that Kenneth was disturbed, Iles asked several psychiatrists and psychologists to examine him. Most failed to discover that Kenneth was a mentally disordered sex offender, primarily because they refused to look at police reports. One even suggested that it would be helpful to Kenneth if he were allowed to work with young children. However, a fifth health professional, a psychologist with experience working with sex offenders, concluded that Kenneth was dangerous and needed both to be treated and to face the consequences of his acts.)

“I introduced Kenneth to the power of the court. I sentenced him to six months in jail, three years formal, supervised probation. He reports to me every 90 days and so does his therapist.

“My point in telling you this is that if I had relied on the best educated minds in the area that were being presented to me, I would have been allowing this person to work unsupervised with young children.”