Reforming Competence Restoration Statutes: An Outpatient Model

Defendants who suffer from mental illness and are found incompetent to stand trial are often ordered committed to an inpatient mental health facility to restore their competence, even if outpatient care may be the better treatment option. Inpatient facilities are overcrowded and place the defendants on long waiting lists. Some defendants then spend weeks, months, or even years in their jail cell, waiting for a transfer to a hospital bed.Outpatient competence restoration programs promise to relieve this pressure. But even if every state suddenly opened a robust outpatient competence restoration program, an obstacle looms: the statutes governing competence restoration, which default to the inpatient treatment model. Several states mandate inpatient restoration in their statutory scheme. The rest allow for outpatient restoration, but the language of these laws often preserves the inpatient default by requiring defendants to meet a series of nebulous criteria before allowing them to participate in outpatient treatment. This Article is the first to examine how the language of competence restoration statutes, even those that allow for outpatient treatment, defaults to commitment to an inpatient facility. I do so by examining the wide latitude these statutes give to judges to place defendants in inpatient care and show how that discretion, paired with widespread false presumptions about the mentally ill, leads to overcommitment of incompetent defendants in state mental health facilities.I propose amendments to these statutes that will encourage judges to place defendants in outpatient care. Statutes must flip from inpatient-required or inpatient-unless to outpatient-unless, defaulting to outpatient treatment unless some specific criteria justify committing the defendant to an inpatient facility. Such a change would relieve pressure on inpatient facilities, opening up space for those who truly need inpatient treatment for competence to be restored. It would also ensure that specific criteria—not misunderstandings or fears about the mentally ill—inform the decision to commit the defendant to inpatient care

An integrated development facility for the calibration of low-energy charged particle flight instrumentation

A system was developed for the calibration and development of thermal ion instrumentation. The system provides an extended beam with usable current rates, approx. 1 pA/sq cm, at beam energies as low as 1 eV, with much higher values available with increasing energy. A tandem electrostatic and variable geometry magnetic mirror configuration within the ion source optimizes the use of the ionizing electrons. The system is integrated under microcomputer control to allow automatic control and monitoring of the beam energy and composition and the mass and angle-dependent response of the instrument under test. The system is pumped by a combination of carbon vane and cryogenic sorption roughing pumps and ion and liquid helium operating pumps

Is Military Justice Sentencing on the March? Should it be? And if so, Where should it Head? Court-Martial Sentencing Process, Practice, and Issues

This article starts with a sketch of the military justice system to orient readers. Understanding that structure, the article then describes the sentencing process for special and general courts-martial. The article follows by identifying two core military sentencing questions: First, should commanders have authority to grant clemency? Second, should the military justice system adopt sentencing guidelines? With respect to each topic presented, the article does not attempt to answer the questions nor offer prescriptions. Rather, it seeks to identify the principal fault lines around which debate should, or will likely, fall. The article next presents ‘‘nutshell’’ introductions to additional sentencing matters that may warrant review as applied in the military context, including the handling of collateral matters, and the relationship between age and culpability. However, for the reasons stated, these issues are not presented in detail here

Applying the take-grant protection model

The Take-Grant Protection Model has in the past been used to model multilevel security hierarchies and simple protection systems. The models are extended to include theft of rights and sharing information, and additional security policies are examined. The analysis suggests that in some cases the basic rules of the Take-Grant Protection Model should be augmented to represent the policy properly; when appropriate, such modifications are made and their efforts with respect to the policy and its Take-Grant representation are discussed

The problem of off duty time in long duration space missions, volume 2 Final report

Proposed activities during off duty time in prolonged manned space mission