Swami, we’re all so glad that the accused child predator Paul Olsson got sent off to the mental hospital. He had been messing with the courts here so long that we thought he was going to get away with it. Your thoughts?
While Swami generally agrees that bad people should get what’s coming to them, we’re ambivalent about Olsson being sent to the state loony bin as a punishment.
Going to a mental hospital is meant to cure illness, not punish wrongdoing. The patients are behind lock and key mostly to protect the patients from the outside world. It’s not really meant to be a prison, or at least hasn’t been for at least a century when mental hospitals were snake pits of human suffering.
It’s true that Olsson, the son of monied parents, has dodged the judicial system here for more than two years simply by refusing to hire an attorney or accept a public defender. He’s stayed free on his parents’ cash $250,000 bond.
He’s mounted an aggressive, antagonistic and, to this point, successful, non-defense based on never allowing a trial to take place. If this tactic were allowed to stand, what criminal would ever allow a trial to take place? Just fight the system to a standstill by refusing to participate.
And you expect that local judges are peeved with the whole mess, because Olsson’s rope-a-dope theory seems to have thwarted anyone’s ability to put him on trial. Meanwhile, the several young boys he’s accused of molesting have no justice and no end to the torment of the unresolved pain.
But how his conduct gets translated into a mental defect or illness is a dicey legal proposition. Maybe he’s devious and clever and deranged in that particular way any accused child molester might be, but that doesn’t mean he’s a nut job under the legal definition. All the court really needs to qualify him fit to stand trial is his ability to help in his own defense and be aware of what the charges mean.
Olsson has cleverly parried that requirement by refusing to participant in any part of his potential trial, including the acknowledgement that there will BE a trial.
Being able to pull that off for two years may make him doggedly clever, but does it make him unfit to stand trial?
In fact, the psychological report used to send Olsson to the state mental facility based its view mostly on the irascibility of Olsson and his unwillingness to be interviewed. Again, that proves he knows how to hornswoggle the system, but does it make him mentally ill?
Swami does not think so.
Ironically enough, if he’d had a real defense lawyer in his corner, that very position could have been argued when the mental pokey possibility was summed by the judge. On the other hand, if he’d had a lawyer under retainer, he’d have to go to trial. We’re not sure why the Public Defender on duty for the case did not make that point with a strong objection.
What we are seeing at work here, in addition to Olsson’s cleverness, is the unwillingless of local judges to take bold legal action that might be, that’s MIGHT BE, reversed on appeal. This is an unusual case, with unusual questions. Timid judges hate those.
Judges in Lake County are deathly afraid of reversals and will do almost anything (including putting up with Olsson’s antics) to avoid such a possibility. LOcla judges who get reversed have to answer for it to their political party or ultimately the voters. Tough cases can petrify jittery judges.
In this case, common sense suggests the judge reject the tricks and order an immediate trial with a public defender. The prosecution could easily have been tasked with showing that Olsson’s tactics over the last two years were not the result of mental defect but a nervy insight into the personality of the court system.
Olsson has friends and relatives who can be ordered to testify to his mental health.
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