Faked Mental Illness Apparently on Rise as Wis. County Jail Fad

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By Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

Published: 05/30/2003

For more than a year, Lamont Smith insisted his world was an unfathomable mess.
The voices of a woman and a dog haunted his head; snakes and monsters stared out at him from mirrors; and 'Sergeant 14 and Sergeant 15' promised they would eventually come to his 'rescue,' according to Milwaukee County Circuit Court records.
'Things fly . . . bugs, criminals, little people,' he told a psychologist earlier this year, according to the psychologist's report.
The longtime felon from Chicago said he was so confused by life that he couldn't make sense of the armed robbery charge facing him in Milwaukee.
Smith spent 14 months in the Milwaukee County Jail, a state mental hospital and the county mental health complex before experts concluded he wasn't ever going to be fit to stand trial. They arranged to put him on a bus to Chicago, where his brother had a room for the 50-year-old father of two, court records show.
But the day before he was to leave, according to prosecutors, he startled a nurse by saying, 'You know I ain't crazy. I was playing it and I got caught up with the meds. I did one year in (the mental hospital) and not 15 years in prison. I was blessed.'
Within days he was back in the County Jail, and recently the armed robbery case that was nearly dismissed was put back on track so Smith could at last stand trial on charges of robbing a woman while visiting Milwaukee in 2001 to attend his mother's funeral.
Prosecutors said Smith's case was an example - albeit extreme - of a fad that appears to have swept through the jail: defendants claiming their mental health precludes them from understanding court proceedings.
Earlier this month, career burglar Robert Kowalkowski, who has nine break-ins on his record, contended that he was contemplating suicide because a male voice and nightmares haunted him in jail.
'Mr. Kowalkowski can control these behaviors if he chooses to do so,' psychiatrist John Pankiewicz said in reporting that the repeat burglar 'is not suffering from a major mental illness.'
Two defendants in the Charlie Young Jr. homicide case also unsuccessfully claimed they were not mentally competent to be in court.
Milwaukee County Assistant District Attorney Thomas Potter, who is prosecuting Smith and Kowalkowski, said five defendants in his current caseload have unsuccessfully raised the issue, usually as a stall tactic.
It is not unusual for some defendants in Milwaukee County Circuit Court - which has more than 6,500 felony cases a year - to be sent temporarily to state mental hospitals because of mental health problems that make it difficult to defend themselves in court.
'There are many people who are caught up in the criminal justice system who are mentally ill,' said public defender Dennis Gall. 'I have a client now with a 15-year history of schizophrenia and paranoia. . . . I've raised competency as an issue at least 400 times in the last 15 years, and in at least 50 percent of the cases, the client was incompetent.'
But in recent months, more defendants appear to have been raising the issue, although they have been unsuccessful.
'In the jail, there is an indoctrination of sorts that takes place,' said veteran forensic psychiatrist George B. Palermo. 'Inmates talk.
'Many have been there several times, and they pass ideas and strategies along to each other.'

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