How Legal Aid, DAs flout the law and keep madmen like NYC stabber on the streets

New York’s criminal justice system has failed crime victims yet again — and its attorneys bear the lion’s share of the blame. Why aren’t the city’s prosecutors asking for mental competence exams — known internally as a Section 730.30 — more regularly at arraignments involving the mentally disturbed? Why aren’t public defenders requesting them on behalf of their mentally ill clients?Ramon Rivera, the offender who allegedly went on a Manhattan stabbing spree Monday and killed three innocents, had a long recidivist history.In all those many encounters, assistant district attorneys, Legal Aid lawyers and judges had to notice he wasn’t playing with a full deck.  As a bail agent who works in the criminal justice system every single day, I can say with authority it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see when a person being prosecuted is suffering from extreme mental illness.  The 730.30 process has been the law forever — but the City of New York isn’t deploying it as a strategy to protect the public from the homeless mentally ill.  It is an effective tool that could prevent a lot of unnecessary suffering.Under New York state law, a criminal court “must issue an order of examination when it is of the opinion that the defendant may be [a psychologically] incapacitated person.”Why isn’t this practice a matter of course in NYC?I’ve sat in on countless thousands of arraignments in my career, and I can tell you the 730.30 statute is tragically under-utilized. Maybe it just comes down to cost: Psychological evaluations cost tons of money, and keeping the dangerous mentally ill in psychiatric hospitals does, too. Obviously it’s easier for the city and state to simply release them back to the streets.But you can’t claim to be a social justice warrior and leave the indigent and the mentally ill to fend for themselves.  Subscribe to our daily Post Opinion newsletter! Please provide a valid email address....