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Portland Maine Justice For The Mentally Ill
Bayside Justice
Portland’s Program for the Mentally Ill
By:
Stan Moody, Ph.D.
November 30, 2009
The Bayside region of Portland is generally known as the area bordered by Washington Ave., Congress St., Portland St. and Forest Ave. It’s my home town of Portland’s nearest thing to the Bowery. There, people share smack, crack, small loans and each other from sundown to sunup. There, police work requires little investigative skill, piecing together cases comprising a web of convenience. There, public defenders paid by the State to lose their cases against the defenseless, make a living wage – barely.
I have a close relationship with a mentally ill person who has lived and worked in the Bayside region of Portland, wandering the streets in his off-time. As a former chaplain at Maine State Prison, knowing what I now know about Bayside Justice, I have fully expected him to become a guest of our erstwhile penal institution.
By the grace of God, so far he has managed to dodge the bullet.
Through my interest in what goes on in Bayside, I spent a year researching the case of a mentally ill inmate housed in Protective Custody at Maine State Prison. I have literally written a heavily-referenced book-length treatise on his case. Barring a reasonable intervention in this miscarriage of justice, Brandon Boone Drewry will likely exit Maine State Prison in a pine box, his destiny another victory in the decades-old fight against homelessness in Portland, championed by none other than ex-Police Chief, “Media Mike” Chitwood.
With due respect to my friend and Drewry, they would adamantly deny any element of mental illness. That’s the nature of the beast. The fact is, however, that my friend has been diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder and perhaps Schizophrenia, while Drewry has a diagnoses of PTSD and an obvious social disorder.
Within three days of residency at a homeless shelter, Drewry, on August 31, 2004, found himself the prime suspect in a sexual assault on a crack whore billed by the media as a housewife because she had a husband and two children at home. The fact that the victim had two samples of semen in her vagina, neither of which was Drewry’s nor her husband’s, was excluded under Maine’s Rape Shield Law, intended to protect the reputation of rape victims.
Drewry was held in county jail for 28 months before trial, during which time he was severely assaulted and went through a number of prominent public defenders, the principle reason being his difficult nature and his demands for justice. There was virtually zero physical evidence in the case. No DNA – hairs and semen – could be traced to Drewry or the victim. It came down to the believability of two street people against a defendant whose courtroom antics and outbursts included sneers and a severely bleeding nose. The trial court and the appeals court applied reasonable standards to the behavior of a mentally ill defendant and denied him a fair trial.
Did he do it? After studying the record, I find few involved with the case, including the jury, who cared one way or another. He had a long history of living under the proverbial societal rock and did not present himself as a person one would want hanging around their suburban neighborhood. His own attorney had this to say on the record: “We all know the effect (his behavior) is having on the jury, but that’s his problem, not ours.”[1]
At the sentencing, the Prosecutor had this to say: “In the state’s mind, the defendant has no redeeming qualities…(He) poses a great risk if he were to be released on probation. He has no ties whatsoever to the State of Maine. He has no stable address. He lived a transient life for more than two decades. He has no familial ties whatsoever…He has a GED education…He is a prime candidate to reoffend.”[2]
The principle justification for this grossly-excessive 30-year sentence was that the defendant failed to exhibit proper courtroom decorum. He had a previous record in Florida of petty drug offenses but no violent crime.
A mentally ill defendant sits in a courtroom, has nose bleeds in front of the jury, is placed at a table slightly removed from his attorneys, makes gestures, engages in occasional outbursts and sneers at witnesses for the Prosecution. It is difficult to imagine this happening in 2006, a time when symptoms of mental illness surely were obvious to the Court. He now is a $40,000 year lifelong guest of Maine State Prison, an overcrowded institution where the more-severely mentally ill inmates are consigned to their own special area within the maximum security unit. Others are spread throughout the general population with minimal care.
Under normal circumstances, without the media hype that surrounded this case, I believe that someone would have stepped in and stopped this charade. The case, however, took on an image intended to demonstrate swift and effective justice in keeping safe the good citizens of Portland. Commendations, instead of discipline for sloppy police work, were handed out after the conviction.
Convicted felon, Brandon Boone Drewry, now sits in Protective Custody at Maine State Prison, barely able to keep his wits about him and estranged from other inmates within his housing unit. The callous disregard that processed him through our court system now finds few resources or the human decency to attend to his treatment or to justice delayed.
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