In January, 26-year-old Emily Hamann was walking along the river path in downtown Bennington when a man named Darren Pronto allegedly ran up behind her, slit her throat with a knife, and killed her.
“And he’s going to get away with premeditated, first-degree murder, because there’s a disconnect in the law,” Hamann’s mother, Kelly Carroll, told lawmakers Wednesday morning.
Carroll said Pronto’s defense attorney will have the opportunity to “shop around” for an expert who could deem Pronto mentally incompetent to stand trial without having to inform the court of any other experts who were also consulted that might not have agreed with that diagnosis.
Prosecutors, conversely, are required to divulge information about the diagnoses of all the experts they consult.
Carroll was testifying in front of the Senate Committee on Judiciary, urging passage of a bill that would change the rules around mental competency and a defendant’s ability to stand trial. She said these changes are long overdue.
Lawmakers and other officials say they’d like to have a designated mental health board review mental competency in cases like these in Vermont to try to end the system where both the defense and prosecution can seek out their own competing evaluations of mental competency.
Before the murder, Pronto had reportedly been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Carroll said that since her daughter’s death, she has learned that Pronto had been in state mental health treatment twice before and once because he threatened to kill his neighbor’s children.
Carroll also worried that the same thing would happen if Pronto were placed in the custody of the Department of Mental Health in her daughter’s case.
“The Department of Mental Health medicates, does whatever they do, and then when they feel like they’re done with him, out he goes with no supervision and no follow-up,” she said.
She said that system doesn’t serve victims or their families — and it makes her fear for the day when Pronto is released.
“When he gets out, I guarantee you there will be more blood,” Carroll said. “There will be more violence, there will be more victims, there will be more bloodshed, and that’s because our laws have enabled him and empowered him. And all our legislators have to take responsibility for that.”
One major component of the legislation, S.3, would allow victims and their families to be notified when perpetrators are released from Department of Mental Health custody. Now, state’s attorneys — who in turn notify victims — are notified only when offenders are released sooner than 90 days after entering the Department of Mental Health custody.
Erica Marthage, Bennington County state’s attorney, said it’s a big mistake that people in public safety, such as state’s attorneys, are shut out from these conversations. She said she knows it isn’t the Department of Mental Health’s job to be thinking about public safety, but too often, it seems, that doesn’t leave anyone in charge of those conversations.
“We definitely need to know when people are deemed to have a return to competency,” she said.
A classic concern with such a notification system is the federal medical privacy law, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, known as HIPAA. However, lawmakers said HIPAA allows exceptions to be made when state law requires that information be disclosed.
However, representatives from the Department of Mental Health questioned the degree to which that was true.
“I’m not sure that’s a free-for-all where we can just kind of say that a state can pass any sort of law and that HIPAA’s OK with that,” said Karen Godnick Barber, general counsel with the department.
Barber said that the mental health department supported an original version of the bill that listed a dozen or so severe crimes that the changes would apply to. However, an amended version of the bill, which lawmakers were considering Wednesday, removed that provision so that assessments could be based on the potential danger posed by a given offender rather than the type of crime involved.
In Pronto’s case, his previous crimes were not as severe as those listed in the original bill, but several factors could have flagged him as potentially dangerous, advocates said.
Barber said that kind of sweeping change concerns her.
“It’s a bit concerning the sheer volume that could be,” she said.
However, she said her office had extremely limited time to look at the revised bill before Wednesday’s committee meeting, so lawmakers agreed to delay a vote until Friday to give the Department of Mental Health more time to assess the changes in the bill.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Mother of murder victim tells lawmakers mental competency laws need to change.