Janaiya Banks Independent Study Fall 2017 Background In the popular Netflix television series, Orange is the New Black, we are introduced to female inmates as they serve out their prison sentences for various crimes. One inmate, Suzanne Warren, nicknamed Crazy Eyes by the other inmates, suffers from mental illness. We see her illness play out through delusions, hallucinations, and aggressive outbursts. As a result of these outbursts, Crazy Eyes is sent to the psych ward for unknown amounts of time. For Crazy Eyes, the psych ward is worse than solitary confinement. She even warns an incoming inmate “Once you go to psych, you get lost in psych.” While Orange is the New Black is a fictional show, the realities about what it means to be an inmate with a mental illness is not. After watching Crazy Eyes deal with her mental illness in prison, from obtaining the proper medication to having to be physically constrained, I decided to look deeper into how we actually deal with mental illness in our prison system, from suicide to the care elderly inmates receive once they are released . Mental health and the criminal justice system have been bound together for a long time. The fact that a mental illness, insanity, can be used as a defense to murder …show more content…
In 1963, the Supreme Court heard Brady v Maryland and held that “The suppression or withholding by the State of material evidence exculpatory to an accused is a violation of due process" . Basically, that means that if the prosecution finds evidence that even suggests that someone other than our clients did the crime then they must turn over that evidence to us. My attorneys often asked for this part of discovery as soon as we got a new case. Sometimes, if the government takes too long to turn over Brady information, the judge might throw an entire case