Inmate’s case raises mental health issues

Matt Pordum

Monday, Jan. 9, 2006 | 7:35 a.m.

Arie Redeker seems to have found all the trouble spots.

From his brush with Clark County medical providers to his appearances in court and now to his jail cell, where he awaits trial facing the death penalty, Redeker has caused hiccups in the mental health and criminal justice systems big enough that the case has captured the attention of medical and legal authorities across Nevada.

His story so far:

On Oct. 19, 2002, Redeker, then 32, had checked himself into Monte Vista Hospital, telling doctors that he was bipolar and had been off his medication for two days. He said he had been drinking and felt depressed after breaking up with his girlfriend a week earlier. He told them he tried to kill himself by starting his car in his closed garage and that he was "fearsome of becoming suicidal again." The records also say that his wrists had slit marks.

Monte Vista doctors noted that Redeker expressed symptoms consistent with someone who is at risk of committing suicide -- or murder. Redeker agreed to go by ambulance to Summerlin Hospital's emergency room for medical clearance, a necessary step before he could be placed in a bed at Monte Vista, a private mental hospital.

Summerlin ER records show that doctors performed lab tests and a medical exam, but after two to three hours of waiting, Redeker left the hospital before the results came back.

Two days later, country prosecutors say, Redeker strangled ex-girlfriend Skawduan Lanna with a telephone cord and dumped her body in the desert near Red Rock.

County prosecutors say Redeker knew it was wrong to kill Lanna. Under Nevada law, that makes him sane enough to be tried and put to death.

Redeker's public defender says his client knew he was unstable and sought help from a deeply flawed mental health system, which ultimately failed him. That failure, the attorney says, should be enough to keep Redeker off death row.

There is no question that when Redeker sought help that October day, he walked into a troubled mental health system. The Sun has reported that over the last two years, many people with mental problems seek help but cannot get it. One in four -- some 60 to 100 persons on any given day -- end up in emergency room beds, getting virtually no treatment for their mental illnesses.

Often, they wind up there because Monte Vista and other mental health facilities are full. A total of 625 people sought help for mental health problems in Clark County's 11 hospitals in October 2002, according to a report by the Nevada Division of Mental Health & Developmental Services. (In December, that number was 2,668, a county record.)

The report called the emergency room crowding a crisis.

Redeker grew tired of waiting in that environment at Summerlin Hospital. No one is saying whether hospital personnel tried to stop him from leaving. Spokesman Rick Plummer said he could not discuss Redeker's visit. But he could talk about the hospital's treatment of patients in general.

"We are a hospital and not a jail," Plummer said. "We're not equipped to handle a mentally ill patient like that for any lengthy period of time."

But Plummer did say that when a patient with mental health problems goes to the emergency room they are monitored in a separate waiting area by a registered nurse and a certified nursing assistant "24 hours a day, seven days a week."

Plummer said that if a patient chooses to leave the hospital the staff "is charged with calling Metro Police." But he said he did not know whether those policies were in place when Redeker was at the hospital.

Even if Redeker had stayed and had been medically cleared to return to Monte Vista, he most likely would not have been checked in because that hospital was full. The wait for beds was about five days.

Plummer noted that a new state psychiatric hospital with 150 beds is to open this year, but it is not nearly enough. "On Day One when the new hospital opens we are already behind the eight ball," Plummer said.

Redeker's attorney, Deputy Public Defender Scott Coffee, wouldn't comment on whether Summerlin Hospital should be held accountable for allowing him to walk away. Coffee suggested putting security guards in waiting rooms and training social workers and others to prevent people suffering from mental problems from leaving.

"If he was bleeding they would have put a tourniquet on the wound," Coffee said. "Mental health issues are just as real and need to be treated just as quickly as a bleeding arm.

"Can you really expect someone with a history of mental health issues to sit around in a waiting room for hours and hours when they are having a breakdown?

"You would think someone with mental health issues claiming to be suicidal, a danger to the community, would get immediate attention instead of being left on a cot for hours."

He also said that Redeker's risk to himself and others goes directly to the legal questions at issue in the case. Under Nevada law, Redeker's mental problems were not serious enough to allow him to plead not guilty by reason of insanity. The law states that a person can plead insanity only if they were unable to know that their criminal actions were wrong.

Additionally, his IQ isn't low enough to qualify him as being mentally retarded and protect him from the death penalty under state law.

Coffee isn't arguing that Redeker was insane or mentally retarded. But Coffee does say that as prosecutors considered Redeker's possible punishment, they should have taken into account his attempt to get help in the days before the murder.

"I would say there is a strong argument for mitigating factors when you have someone who seeks help and is then left unattended," Coffee said.

Given those realities, the issue for the district attorney's office is a moral one, Coffee said. "Do you seek the death penalty on someone that has mental health issues, sought help and wasn't given any."

The district attorney's office death penalty review committee chose the death penalty in the case based on two aggravating circumstances, "namely that the murder was committed by a person under sentence of imprisonment," because Redeker was on probation at the time of the alleged murder and because Redeker "had previously been convicted of a felony involving the use of threat of violence to the person of another."

Prosecutors contend Redeker's conviction for second-degree arson for setting his own unoccupied garage on fire involved "the use of threat of violence to the person of another." Although second-degree arson is usually considered a property crime, Redeker had threatened to kill Lanna prior to torching his house.

In Nevada, any number of so-called "aggravators," including previous felonies and the crime committed, can qualify a defendant for the death penalty.

The Nevada Supreme Court is currently reviewing that element of the case to determine whether second-degree arson is an acceptable aggravator for prosecutors to use in seeking the death penalty for Redeker.

Prosecutor Robert Daskas would not specifically say in an interview whether the death penalty committee considered Redeker's mental health. But he did say that "contrary to Coffee's assertions we provided the committee with every bit of information that Coffee provided to us."

Daskas stands by the decision to seek the death penalty, adding that a jury will ultimately decide what's right.

"Quite simply, it's our position that 12 members of the community should decide whether his (Redeker's) state of mind mitigates the commission of murder," Daskas said.

UNLV Boyd School of Law Professor Lynn Henderson said the Redeker case, and cases where prosecutors seek the death penalty against people with mental health issues, is another example that "under Nevada law any first-degree murder is a death case if a prosecutor decides to go forward with it."

Matt Pordum can be reached at 474-7406 or at [email protected].