Weaponized by Treatment? Mental Health Courts Wielding Dangerous Justice

Republished with permission from AbleChild.

Mental health courts were sold as a humane alternative to jail sentences, but the attack on Vice President JD Vance’s Ohio home reveals a mental health system that hides treatment, shields providers, and fails both the public and the defendant.

26-year-old Trans offender William DeFoor also identified as “Julia,” has been charged in vandalizing the Vice President’s Cincinnati home and is one of the growing number of psychiatric patients who have become recipients of the benevolence of mental health “diversion” court. Commit a crime, blame mental heath issues and get a free pass.

In Ohio, like other courts throughout the US, prosecutors can pull a case from the criminal court track and refer it to be heard in a diversion court or “intervention in lieu of conviction” program the same prosecutors helped design. Once diverted, if the defendant completes treatment (usually psychiatric drugs), makes regular contact with court representatives and avoids new criminal charges, the reward can be a dismissed case or reduced record, even for serious criminal offenses. Victims and neighbors receive paperwork and the opportunity to object, but are removed from the process that decides whether the defendant is shuffled into a special mental health court docket.

William DeFoor is proof of how this mental health diversion can go seriously wrong. Public records and media coverage reveal he had earlier run-ins with the law, including a trespass at a psychiatric facility and a 2024 vandalism case that sent him into court-ordered mental health treatment instead of criminal court sentencing. That “treatment in lieu of conviction” deal put DeFoor under a mental-health court structure for two years with promised supervision and care. Less than a year later, DeFoor has been accused of an attack on Vice President Vance’s Cincinnati home with a hammer, smashing windows and damaging federal security equipment while ignoring commands to stop.

The public has no right to see the key details that might explain DeFoor’s obvious mental health treatment failure. No one outside the tight circle of “diversion” court and behavioral health providers is told which state agency treated DeFoor, which psychotropic drugs were used, whether side effects were monitored, or how often DeFoor was actually seen by mental health professionals.

Officials and clinicians will point to privacy rules to avoid answering basic questions about what went wrong in DeFoor’s treatment. Training materials for treatment courts stress confidentiality, rapid diversion, and collaboration with mental health providers, but provide almost nothing about clear accountability when a diverted defendant becomes a danger and exhibits additional criminal behavior.

So, who exactly created the diversion court training materials? One might assume that because The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) is involved in setting up the training of law enforcement throughout the country, it also has its hand in the diversion courts.

But there is an even darker question that this secrecy invites. The public has no way of knowing who funds these behavioral-health providers used in the diversion courts, whether they have foreign investors, or whether hostile actors could exploit heavily drugged, mentally unstable people as weapons aimed at political leaders.

It is important to know how these diversion courts are funded because recall that the State of Montana outsourced its behavioral health programs to China-run companies. One could surmise that this is a risk created by a structure that hides financial ties, clinical decisions, and the full extent of government-Provider partnerships from public view. The combination of secret money, secret drugs, and access to vulnerable defendants is exactly the sort of environment where weaponization could happen without being detected until it is far too late.

DeFoor was still under felony mental health court supervision when he allegedly attacked Vice President Vance’s home, and the “treatment in lieu of conviction” from his 2024 vandalism case was ongoing. During his bond hearing, which was held in criminal court – not diversion court – the prosecutor advised the judge the state was “concerned that the defendant is under supervision with felony mental health court for a case that has similar facts,” making clear this was not a man who had successfully completed the program and slipped away but, rather, someone the system was actively claiming to manage.

The Ohio judge was reminded that a prior 2023 trespass case at UC Health’s psychiatric center had ended with a formal finding that DeFoor was incompetent to stand trial, and that DeFoor had later been placed under guardianship and ordered into treatment and medication through the mental-health docket.

Yet, instead of questioning whether that earlier judgment and treatment plan had failed, the court treated the attack as one more “mental health issue” to be processed, setting state bonds at $11,000 while a separate federal judge ordered DeFoor held by U.S. Marshals pending a detention hearing and possible grand jury action on charges that could carry decades in prison.

The Vice President and his family were not in Cincinnati at the time of the attack and lucky that DeFoor’s attack resulted in nothing more than broken windows. However, the larger question is whether DeFoor should even have been out on the street after the numerous earlier convictions. The larger question is whether mental health diagnoses are worthy of special court treatment and, more to the point, how many of these criminal court “diversions” have reoffended?

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