During the most recent legislative session, lawmakers unanimously passed and the governor signed House Bill 385.

The bill changes how the state court system interacts with people who have serious mental health needs.

It's referred to as Seth's Law, and it honors Seth Stephens.

He was the staff attorney for Kentucky's Judicial Commission on Mental Health, and he died by suicide in 2023.

In tonight's legislative update, our Clayton Dalton brings you this report on Seth's law.

Two years ago, the Kentucky Supreme Court announced the creation of the Judicial Commission on Mental Health.

The group is charged with helping people in the justice system who are dealing with mental health issues, substance abuse and intellectual disabilities.

House Bill 385, now referred to as Seth's Law, was borne out of recommendations from the commission.

The new law focuses on two areas the court system deals with.

The first being guardianship.

Or guardianship in Kentucky is actually two things.

Guardianship is over your person, so your personal affairs.

And then many also have what's called a conservatorship, and that's over your finances.

So if you think of guardianship, guard the people, and then the conservator guards the funds and conserves those dollars.

Most often, guardianship protects elderly people who have developed memory diseases like dementia or Alzheimer's.

A family member will take over decision making for them, but individuals with serious mental health issues can have guardians, too.

Increasingly common is people who have severe mental illness and they have unfortunately gotten to a place in their life where they just can't even care for their basic needs.

They're not staying compliant with their medical needs, in particular, not taking their their mental health medications.

And the family needs to be able to step in and support them.

Oftentimes, we see people who have to seek guardianship because they maybe lived together and never married, but for all intents and purposes have been in one another's lives.

They'd have to go through this process when they really know the wishes and desires of the person who needs the guardianship.

So it expands that to allow loved ones who aren't direct relatives to start making health care decisions in times of crisis.

Seth Law also deals with competency.

Competence is determined by a defendant's ability to rationally have a rational understanding of the legal proceedings and consult with their attorney.

That's a very simplistic version, but that's the basic standard for competence.

Prior to this new law, all felony competency evaluations happened at the Kentucky Correctional Psychiatric Center, or Casey, P.C.

That process was inefficient.

The waitlist for an inpatient bed at KCP had an extensive backlog simply because we have a finite number of beds and the facility and prior to CPK piloting an outpatient evaluation process in May of 2022, every order on a felony case asking for a competency evaluation came as an inpatient patient through PCP.

So that created an extended wait time of over several months.

These evaluations can now happen in an outpatient setting.

This outpatient evaluation process allows that evaluation to occur so quickly that it allows the system, that criminal justice process, to move forward at a must faster pace.

It promotes recovery resilience across the Commonwealth, and it also fosters swifter justice for victims of crime and their families and communities.

So it really has a lot of stakeholder buy in and the effects are positive across the board.

For Kentucky Edition.

I'm Clayton Dalton.

Thank you, Clayton.

The wait list for competency hearings averaged 12 months, but SEC Law is expected to shorten the assessment timeline to 3 to 5 weeks.