Sarah Stillman
speaker
106 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Sarah Stillman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, I really, really respected that the head of that company, Brad McLean, was willing to talk with me.
And I thought he made some really important arguments about the fact that he does seem to believe that it's important that people get mental health care in their communities first before they're even sent to jail and that they provide it once they're in jail and actually have the resources to do so. I think what's devastating is that it's just hard to look at so many instances where this
did happen, again, not just with NAFCARE, but also many other companies. And also some counties that didn't privatize also had these deaths. And so it's sometimes hard to figure out how to bridge the disconnect between the rhetoric around the care we as a society want to provide and the rhetoric many of these corporations say they are committed to providing and then
I'm seeing these outcomes in what I recognize is a very, very, very hard environment in which to do this work, because, again, I think that's the fundamental core problem here is the wrong decision to be criminalizing people for their mental health issues and keeping them detained far too long pretrial.
Because, again, the record-keeping is so bad to begin with on this type of death, I think we don't really have clear data on that. But I think what we do know is that a wealth-based detention system fundamentally ends up discriminating against people not on the basis of anything other than their wealth.
And so in assessing whether someone should be locked up for so long, I mean, we're also just paying a tremendous amount of the society to lock people up for their mental health issues and again, on things that judges, once the people get their day in court, often wind up dismissing or giving a lesser charge to anyway.
So I think if we could find other systems, even at the front end for dealing with police calls, I mean, I think one thing that's being explored very productively is that the alternative to locking someone up in such an instance could be having a mental health team arrive and instead of armed officers who are not
necessarily trained to help someone in the midst of a mental health crisis, having people for whom that is their expertise be the ones responding, I think, can also really help this issue at the front end before someone's even facing the question of whether they can afford cash bail.
this one's going to haunt me for a long time um i think in part because it's so many layers of our collective failure and i wish it could just be one thing that i my intention was to set out finding one thing that we could change and instead i found this cascade of things i mean starting with like why are so many people unhoused and what would it really take to address that and
One of the things I'm most drawn to in journalism is, you know, in a world of just so many overwhelming and intractable social problems, it does feel like there's times when you see things where there's just a very clear room for change.
And I think when it comes to the idea that, like, yes, it's hard to figure out how do we truly address the roots of the mental health crisis we're in, but it feels like a thing I've Deeply believe is doable is ensuring that people are not dying. Teenagers, elderly folks, all kinds of folks of starvation and dehydration in our county jails and our own communities.
And I feel like having communities take a closer look at what's happening in spaces that have been kind of held from the public's eyes to some of the most vulnerable communities. people who deserve the most rudimentary treatment at the very least. I really do feel like that is something we are societally capable of in this moment and something that I hope reporting can be a part of bringing about.
Basically, it means that people can be, in many states, prosecuted for murder, and in some cases, first-degree murder, if they were along in the commission of a felony where someone died, even if that was not their intention. So to break that down, what that could mean and does mean in some places is that... Some teenagers broke into a house and thought they were going to steal an Xbox.
And the police arrived at the scene and shot one of the kids. And another of the young people there was charged with the murder of the friend that the police had actually shot and killed. So the basic idea is to hold people accountable for knowing they went into dangerous situations. But it can lead to surprising stretches of what we think of the concept of murder as meaning.
Well, so I wrote about the case of a young man named Sadiq Baxter in Florida, and he had made the bad decision to go out gambling with his friend. And he and the friend had, after losing a bunch of money, gone and started to jostle the car handle doors of unlocked vehicles and take loose change. They took a drum set. They took a number of other things from these unlocked cars.
A neighbor called the police, and Sadiq was actually arrested and placed in handcuffs. And he thought that would be that. And it turned out his friend had been around the corner in his vehicle and had tried to flee the scene when the cops arrived.
And he wound up being chased in a high-speed chase by law enforcement and ultimately miles away from where Sadiq was wound up tragically hitting and killing two bicyclists. And it turned out that Sadiq then wound up being prosecuted on two counts of first-degree murder, which it's important to note in Florida carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole.
So that is ultimately what Sadiq was convicted of.
Exactly. So he really believed he was innocent of the charge of murder. He immediately accepted that he had done a wrong thing by taking from the unlocked cars. So he pled guilty on that charge, which in Florida actually did carry, I believe it was something like 25 years or something of the sort. So it was already a quite lengthy sentence there.
And he thought, OK, I'll take the other part of this, the murder part, to trial. But it turned out he didn't realize the way felony murder works. It actually meant that the judge basically said, my hands are tied. Like, you, you know, pled to this felony. And that means that you are de facto guilty of first degree murder, since that's the way the felony murder doctrine works in Florida.
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