If you oversee a justice system that includes nearly a dozen people charged with murdering a mental health patient, it’s probably best to abstain from conversations about how other states mete out justice unfairly.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin evidently didn’t get the memo.
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Youngkin was one of many Republicans who threw public tantrums over the news that a Manhattan grand jury had voted to indict former President Donald Trump in the Stormy Daniels hush money case. Virginia’s governor, who has been floated as a potential 2024 presidential candidate, tweeted that it’s “beyond belief” that such a thing could happen to a former president and current presidential candidate, claiming that the action against Trump was “manufactured” and being done for “political gain.”
Youngkin’s claim that this indictment was “manufactured” for “political gain” is undermined by the fact that, presently, only the people who’ve been witness to the grand jury proceedings know what the indictment is even for.
And he has no room to declare which things cause people to lose faith in the justice system.
A local prosecutor in Virginia recently brought second-degree murder charges against seven sheriff’s deputies and three staff members at Central State Hospital, a state-run mental health facility established in the 19th century as the Central Lunatic Asylum for Colored Insane.
The prosecutor said the deputies and workers fatally “smothered” Irvo Otieno, a 28-year-old Black man, as they restrained him on the ground for more than 10 minutes. (Attorneys for those charged have defended their clients’ actions.)
Youngkin has since said the state’s mental health system is overwhelmed, but as Christie Thompson wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post last week, that doesn’t tell the full story.
Thompson, who is a staff writer for The Marshall Project, wrote:
[I]t was not just a lack of services that killed Otieno. A crisis team was present during his initial encounter with police, who brought him to a specialized receiving center. And he was in the care of a state hospital when he died. Yet being admitted for treatment did not protect him from what prosecutors say was a deadly use of police force.
More mental health care is no simple panacea. In my years of covering mental health care and our justice system, psychologists and disability rights advocates have told me that getting people the care they need requires not only a ramping up of mental health resources but also rethinking how those people can still be criminalized every step of the way.
Put another way, bias can play a major role in the treatment of mental health patients. If Youngkin weren’t so obsessed with framing discussions about bias as inherently bad, perhaps he’d be better equipped to handle issues of unfair justice that lie at his own feet.
This is part of the reason that the Rev. Al Sharpton (who hosts a show on MSNBC) name-checked the governor — and referred to his potential White House campaign — at Otieno’s funeral.
“It’s going to take more,” Sharpton said, “than you wearing a vest and campaign smile when you got folks being stampeded by law enforcement. ... Mr. Governor, on your way to wherever you’re going in the future, what about Irvo?”
Seems like Youngkin’s plate is full. As soon as he cleans up the justice system he oversees, then — maybe — he can credibly criticize others.