Photo courtesy of Washington County Detention Center
KTLO, Classic Hits and the Boot News today begins a three-part series on the mentally ill sitting in county jails for years waiting to be tried or threated. The series focuses on a rural Baxter County man, Casey Lawson. He was arrested in early January 2020 and has been jailed in Baxter or Washington County ever since. He has never been found guilty of any of the charges against him.
On January 4, 2020, a then 19-year-old rural Mountain Home man was arrested and charged with hitting his mother leaving her with serious injuries.
Since the initial arrest, the now 23-year-old Casey Dillan Lawson has either been in jail or in the custody of the Arkansas Department of Human Services in Baxter and Washington Counties.
He has not been found guilty of any of the charges against him. He has been found mentally ill and unfit to proceed. In Arkansas, that is a major and growing problem.
Today, Lawson sits in the Washington County jail in Fayetteville having again been found mentally unfit to proceed in a new case in which he is charged with attempted rape.
Ironically, the reason Lawson was taken to Northwest Arkansas from Baxter County was for treatment of his mental health problems.
The police report says Lawson and a woman were sitting behind the “Ozark Guidance Center’s building” when the sexual contact is said to have occurred. Lawson was arrested at the facility, according to a DHS spokesman in Little Rock.
The spokesman said Lawson had been receiving treatment from Ozark Guidance Center at the Baxter County jail until he was moved.
The spokesman said, “with the approval of the court,” Lawson was discharged from the Baxter County jail and placed in the custody of the Ozark Guidance Center, a contractor for the Department of Human Services. He was reported to have been transported to a transitional housing facility in Springdale.
According to DHS, “mental health treatment can be provided at the Arkansas State Hospital in Little Rock or by contractors, such as Ozark Guidance, either in the home, the community or by way of jail-based services.”
The rape case in Northwest Arkansas was filed on September 6 last year. According to a Springdale Police Department’s preliminary report, Lawson was arrested when he allegedly rubbed his penis in a female’s face.
According to the report, the two had been sitting “behind the Ozark Guidance Center building” when Lawson is alleged to have dropped his pants and exposed himself.
When police talked to him, an officer asked him what happened and he is alleged to have replied, “the thing with the girl?”
Lawson told police that voices in his head told him to do what he did “or people would be tortured.”
As in Baxter County, Lawson was found unfit to proceed in the rape case in Northwest Arkansas and remains in the custody of DHS.
When Lawson was transferred to Northwest Arkansas, his case in Baxter County was closed.
DHS is now responsible for either bringing him back to a point where he is considered fit to proceed, or to declare it is not possible to return him to that point in which case a longer-term treatment plan would have to be laid out.
His address on the Springfield police report is shown as a public housing unit along 48th Street. After he was arrested and booked into the Washington County jail on the attempted rape charge, Lawson was listed as homeless.
The current schedule called for DHS to make a status report to the court on efforts to bring him back to a point where he can be determined mentally fit to proceed, according to Hannah Bell, the Washington County deputy prosecutor handling the case.
But, like so many dates established for an inmate to either be examined or treated for mental problems, Lawson’s update had not been provided to the court and his case was recently pushed back to mid-December, according to an order of continuance filed in the case.
If Lawson’s case goes to trial in mid-December, he will have been in jail for three years, 11 months and 12 days since originally being arrested in Baxter County in early 2020.
How much treatment he has gotten while in jail is difficult to determine since providers are not allowed to answer questions about a person’s condition or treatment.
Lawson is dealing with what have been described as “serious” mental problems.
In has been noted in court documents that Lawson tried to kill himself three times in five weeks in June and July 2018. It was alleged he had slashed his wrist, swallowed motor oil and ingested 40 Thorazine pills.
He was committed to mental health treatment facilities following each of the three suicide attempts.
As to the attempts to kill himself, Lawson was quoted as saying “God had told him to kill himself so he could go to heaven.” He has been reported to have told investigators he “is ready to go to a place of peace.”
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