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Illinois officials shudder at the thought that Yoder might get out. They say his threatening correspondence--"I'll make sure there isn't enough of you left to identify," reads a typical letter to a judge--proves he is a dangerous man who will explode. But in Illinois, as in all other states, only dangerous people who are also deemed mentally ill can be involuntarily committed. That's why Illinois has hired its own big-ticket experts to evaluate Yoder and, presumably, testify against him. One, the forensic psychologist Reid Meloy, worked with prosecutors on the Timothy McVeigh trial. Meloy & Co. will lend outside heft to the government's position that Yoder suffers from delusional and paranoid disorders so severe that he doesn't recognize them. As state psychologist Daniel Cuneo said in a 1999 trial, "Mr. Yoder continues to have much rage. Without tight controls, he will erupt."
Yoder's case is unusual but perhaps not unique. About 22,000 Americans are held against their will in state psychiatric hospitals. Since the 1960s, many of those institutions have closed, and hundreds of thousands of patients have been freed, some of them improvidently. Many ended up in jail; others are homeless. A few mentally ill people have committed homicides after being discharged, and those killings have won vast media coverage. In response, seven states have passed laws making it easier for authorities to force psychiatric treatment. Recently the nation tried to make sense of Andrea Yates, who drowned her children after years of ineffective schizophrenia treatment. Her case revealed a mental-health system too distracted and meagerly funded to decide what to do with her.
But another side of the mental-health story is about those who are locked up and perhaps should not be. Some 78,000 people live in public and private mental hospitals. Advocates of laws making it easier to commit people argue that hospitalizing those who don't recognize their severe mental illness can help both them and the rest of us. Dr. Fuller Torrey, a get-tough proponent who has battled Yoder's supporters, says two studies show that roughly 40% of those released from psychiatric hospitals end up in jail within a year.
Still, as a recent New York Times series revealed, institutions for the mentally ill don't always provide a safe environment. A Times reporter found that unskilled workers at private homes for the mentally ill in New York had neglected patients and coerced some into unneeded surgery. "Psychiatric survivors" from around the nation have formed a movement to publicize abuses against them, chiefly unnecessary drugging and involuntary electroshock.
Largely because of his legal prowess, Yoder has endured nothing so extreme. But even though some of his fellow residents at the Chester hospital committed murders of breathtaking brutality, he has lived at the state's only maximum-security facility for the criminally insane more than twice as long as the average patient. His advocates say it was a suspicious chain of events that got Yoder committed in the first place, and there is evidence to support them. The tale of his arrival at Chester is long and winding, but it reveals some startling lapses in the legal system designed to protect people from being wrongly committed.