Table of Contents
Multnomah County Judge Nan Waller once received an unusual request from a man in her courtroom.
She cried and asked him to go to jail. The streets of Portland were so cold that it was impossible to turn back. He planned to sleep in the lecture hall until his staff came up with a program to help him.
Waller is at the center of Oregon’s mental health crisis. He runs the state’s largest mental health court, a grant program that helps people stay in treatment, access social services and limit their freedom. He also evaluates the fitness of hundreds of defendants each year at the Oregon Medical Center to determine if they need community programs or treatment before going to court.
It is not easy to answer, neither the judge nor those appearing before him in court. Oregon lacks counselors and treatment facilities for people with mental illness. When the defendant appeared in Waller, Oregon, he emphasized that behavioral health interventions could not help people maintain their mental health, stay out of prison, or even prevent crime. . Help stop this while the country is facing a multi-faceted crisis.
The treatment crisis occurred at Oregon State Hospital, which has court-ordered treatment and release dates for people. And the fentanyl overdose epidemic kills hundreds of Oregonians each year.
Waller acknowledges that society has problems and says the solution starts with all of us. The Oregonian encourages people with behavioral health problems to treat them with the same compassion as other health problems.
“We all saw people walking down the street in some sort of trouble, and some people took out their cell phones and filmed themselves because they thought they were in trouble,” Waller told the Capital Chronicle. “We don’t pretend someone has a heart attack in the middle of the road.” People don’t take out their cell phones to film. They call 911 and say, ‘Someone really needs help.’ There is a need here.”
Waller, who has served on the court for more than two decades, is a judge there.
He grew up in Portland and graduated from Lincoln High School in 1972. After attending Stanford University in California, Waller attended the University of Oregon School of Law in Eugene, graduating in 1979.
While studying law, she met her future husband, Paul Bowernick. After three years of friendship, he ordered a beer at Taylor’s, half a mile from camp. The two became inseparable as they studied for the bar exam and spent time hiking and enjoying the Willamette River.
“When it came time to choose the bar, we felt that different elements of an outdoor bar would work well,” Bowernick said in an interview.
After an unsuccessful investigation, Bowernick and Waller demanded answers.
“I purposely started asking all my friends and Nan sat there horrified because she couldn’t tell if I had passed the bar or not,” he said. “I hit him for about three minutes and then I said ‘thank you’ and he stopped.
Then he said yes naan you have passed the exam.
The couple moved to Billings, Montana to take their first law jobs before marrying in 1980.
judge said the experience was important to Waller’s career.
“Nan’s system is a perfect representation of what happens when people fail,” he said. “The people I represented in legal services were living in poverty, many of them people of color or Native American, and the system was, and still is, degrading them.”
Waller said those experiences taught him that decisions have unintended consequences. He sued the abusive owner in Montana and ordered him to court. Instead, he took part in the property.
In the past, Waller said, new lawyers took on tasks that were outside of their scope. However, her popularity grew when she teamed up with other attorneys advocating for state aid and benefits for torture victims in Montana.
And Waller has learned how to deal with tough people, which is what a judge needs.
At first she had to deal with clients who were suspicious of her methods and fascist judges who showed no sympathy for women lawyers.
Waller says one of his first clients in Montana looked at him and said, “I don’t want a lawyer.”
Responded promptly.
“So I said,’You’re lucky, I’m not a kid anymore.’
After a few years, they moved to Portland, where Waller began working as an attorney for the Metropolitan Public Defenders, which represents defendants who cannot afford to hire their own attorneys. He spent most of those five years working on children’s issues.
In the 1990s, as Waller added three children to her family, she became a full-time juvenile court administrator in Multnomah County, working with children in the courts. Waller was also a district court judge, a job that often required other judges.
In 2001, the then Govt. John Kitzhaber was appointed a full-time district judge and currently makes about $163,500 a year, according to state law.
After serving in the court’s family law division and as presiding judge, Waller assumed the role of presiding judge in the mental health court in 2018.
Your job is to make sure the criminals are caught so they can defend themselves. As a judge, he recognizes the severe lack of mental health services for people in the community before coming to his courtroom and often visits the Oregon State Hospital for treatment in the community.
The solution is for people to seek treatment in communities rather than government hospitals. Waller said there aren’t enough options to meet the demand.
“They can’t get the level of care they need because all the programs turn them away,” Waller said. “Our goal is to keep people in the community as long as possible.”
However, if the individual is not ready to become a part of society, chances are high that he will.
“The worst thing is when we bring someone into the community for the first time and it doesn’t work out from the beginning,” Waller said. “They leave the show or go away and sometimes we see people come back with serious allegations, which doesn’t help.”
He appears in court at the Multnomah County Jail one day a week. Thus he sees people at the lowest point of life.
“When you come in, it’s cheaper in every way,” Waller said. People talk to themselves. People pollute their bodies.
Most people are yelling at Waller, not out of anger at his decisions, but because of his state of mind.
Waller said the prison system is doing its best. However, as a professional trained to identify systemic flaws, it is clear to me that Oregon’s mental health system needs improvement.
“Is it as good as we can make it? No?”
Overall, Waller points to a history that has shaped Oregon’s behavioral health system since 1963, when President John F. Kennedy signed the Community Mental Health Act. signed
As a result, many well-known and prominent institutions for the mentally ill in America were closed. But the federal law, Waller said, falls short of its second goal: an adequate network of local mental health services to help people.
That history alone doesn’t explain why Oregon consistently ranks first in national studies of behavioral health access.
“I don’t understand why we’re always at the bottom of the states in terms of availability and our results,” Waller said.
State lawmakers recognize the challenge and have committed $1.3 billion to develop new health facilities, programs and staff in 2021 alone.
However, sometimes the results are difficult to change.
“What is happening?” Waller said. “How are we doing?”
Samshaw discussed improving access to treatment during meetings with federal officials at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Waller said. The president said Oregon is innovative, but Waller said the state has a poor track record of implementing the program.
“It’s been haunting me ever since,” Waller said.
Critics say a recent example of poor enforcement is Measure 110, which decriminalized drug addiction by allowing users to access programs and services. Some criminals believe the system allows them to use drugs in prison, Waller said. But the laws require people to stay away from anything that could influence their behavior, such as drugs and alcohol.
“People say, ‘What mean you can’t procedure?’, ‘I think it’s legal to do the procedure,'” Waller said. “But some people do. And that’s really sad.”
Waller said the dangers of methamphetamine and fentanyl were so severe that the mental health court recommended replacing overdoses with naloxone, in an effort to rehabilitate patients.
“It’s scary,” Waller said. “It’s a lot. And it makes it much harder for people to have mental illness.”
Waller admits he doesn’t have the answer to Oregon’s problem. However, she is concerned about the limited availability of mental health and addiction treatment in the province.
Accommodation
When he was ill, he worked with Laura Cohen-Waller, the court’s mental health coordinator. Mental health courts help people with mental illness access supervision services, continue their medication and avoid prison. Every week there is a special event. Those who successfully complete the program may be on probation for a limited time.
Cohen said clients in the program show up despite not having a court date because they are popular.
Courts believe it can be protected.
He was out. in Judge Waller’s office,” he said.
Every courtroom has people working behind the scenes: lawyers, social workers, judges and clerks.
But the judge is in between.
“There’s a whole bunch of people doing the work, but at the end of the day, black people have the biggest impact,” Cohen said.
Waller is willing to experiment and try new things. At one point, Cohen visited the mental health court in Houston where he once worked to see how the judge ran his house.
Waller contributes to policymaking through committee work on various state and national advisory committees and task forces, providing input on behavioral health and criminal justice issues.
Waller helped the county develop its online court system and talked to lawmakers about funding the Multnomah County Courthouse.
Waller also chairs the Supreme Court’s Advisory Committee on Behavioral Health, which was created by Chief Justice Martha Walters to provide input on mental health and criminal justice.
In 2022, Walters wrote a letter nominating Waller for the William H. Rehnquist Award, a national judicial honor honoring the late U.S. Supreme Court justice.
(German) … um “equality and justice,” Walters wrote in his resignation letter.
Waller received the award in October.
In the interview, Walters said Waller represents a new kind of judge.
“The judiciary to changed a since office, and I don’t think your job to sit in court or say, ‘Your motion is going to granted or denied,'” Walters said. Walters said. We are trying. Do more to help people solve problems. And I think we’ve seen Judge Waller’s willingness to go out and do good work.
Others agreed.
Benton County Circuit Court Judge Matthew Donohue works with Waller on a team of behavioral health counselors. He said he recognizes the big picture and wants everyone to be involved in the political conversation.
“One thing about Judge Waller is that he’s very nice,” Donohue said.
Waller complained of Oregon’s lack of resources to care for his predecessors as refugees.
One in seven. But all you can do is ‘let them come’ and we’ll work hard.
Judges focus on the people behind the numbers. Each day you look and find a word to describe your goals.
They often choose words like “stable” and “healthy.”
When Wall was once asked about his comments, he replied, “You’re satisfied. I’m committed to making sure you get what you need.”
