BALTIMORE — A 51-year-old man experiencing homelessness stole coffee, donuts, chips and a chicken wrap from a Wawa in Millersville one night in September and told employees that he would “kill everyone in the store” if they called the police, which they did.

Anne County Police officers said they confiscated a “large knife” from the man, who was charged with concealing a dangerous weapon, theft and making a threat of mass violence.

But authorities believed the man was experiencing a psychiatric crisis. Eventually, he met with mental health clinicians from the Anne Arundel County Crisis Response System, a county organization that connects people in behavioral health crisis with resources to help them. They developed a treatment plan for him, the man’s attorney said in court Wednesday.

The man’s case was one of the first called in Anne Arundel County District Court’s Mental Health Court program, which started Wednesday. The docket, which resembles others in similar courts throughout the state, seeks to put people in mental health treatment, rather than prison, for the crimes they are accused of committing.

“The intersection of mental health problems and the criminal justice system is an issue of great concern,” said Matthew J. Fader, chief justice of the Supreme Court of Maryland, at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the court program in Anne Arundel County.

“We can no longer say, ‘The courts aren’t built for it,’” Fader added, citing a “staggering” number of people with mental health and substance abuse issues caught in the criminal justice system

Maryland’s first mental health court began in Baltimore District Court in 2002. Since then, specialized dockets mirroring it have launched in district courts in Allegany, Baltimore, Harford, Frederick, Montgomery, Prince George’s and Worcester counties. Baltimore City and Montgomery and Worcester counties also have mental health court dockets in their circuit courts, where felony cases are handled.

Each mental health court has its own procedures, according to the Maryland Judiciary. Some, like Baltimore’s, require a defendant to plead guilty to be able to participate, which usually means a probation that is conditional to a person completing an agreed-upon mental health treatment plan.

Anne Arundel County is doing things differently, county judicial officials said in interviews with The Capital and The Baltimore Sun. Defendants won’t necessarily be required to plead guilty to participate in the program, though their participation depends on prosecutors’ willingness to “divert” their cases, and it will rely on Anne Arundel County Crisis Response System to play a unique role.

“We are bringing it from the shadows,” said District Judge Shaem C.P. Spencer, administrative judge for the Anne Arundel County District Court. “We don’t believe mental health, mental crises are criminal acts.”

District Judge Jennifer M. Alexander will lead the county’s docket, and Spencer described her as uniquely qualified to make a difference. Alexander’s daughter died by suicide; Thursday would have been her 18th birthday.

When she was a defense attorney, one of her clients, Angelina Bolan, also died by suicide while participating in the mental health court program in Baltimore District Court. Though it is unclear if anything could’ve been done to prevent Bolan’s suicide, her relatives said Baltimore’s court system lacked empathy for her struggles with schizophrenia.

“I understand in the criminal justice system, [regarding] mental health, there’s a desperate need for recognition, for bringing it out of the shadows, for talking about it, for not being afraid of it and addressing it and providing the treatment,” Alexander said. “When you take those personal and professional experiences that I’ve had… I feel a great responsibility to help others.”

The county crisis response system will evaluate defendants to see if they have a mental health issue, whether they’re amenable to treatment and if they would be a good fit for mental health court, officials said. Crisis response is also responsible for monitoring a defendant’s progress and reporting back to the attorneys and court, a role held in other jurisdictions by state probation agents.

“We’re making it person centered not system centered. I think that’s where things get lost,” said Lt. Steve Thomas, who leads the Anne Arundel County Police Department’s Crisis Intervention Team, in an interview. “I think it’s going to revolutionize mental health court because of how it’s so person-centered as a diversion.”

Defense attorneys, prosecutors, family or friends, police officers — anyone — can recommend someone for mental health court, triggering an evaluation and the potential for treatment, Alexander and Spencer said.

“I think we can help a lot of people that maybe we missed through the crisis system,” Jen Corbin, who leads the county Crisis Response System, said in an interview. “It’s really just another intercept point for us to help somebody.”

Research on mental health courts nationally describes the dockets as well intentioned, but questions their premise and efficacy. The dockets are based on the fundamental idea that some people commit crimes because of their mental illness, but scholars say a limited number of offenses are attributable to symptoms of a psychiatric condition, but rather factors such as defendants’ socio-economic status.

The primary goal of the dockets is to prevent repeated criminal behavior, but “it is unclear whether mental health courts actually reduce recidivism and, to the extent they do, what accounts for that success,” wrote E. Lea Johnston, a professor at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law who studies the nexus between criminal law and mental health, in a 2012 peer reviewed article titled “Theorizing Mental Health Courts.”

The Maryland Judiciary’s Office of Problem Solving Courts, which oversees mental health court programs, said in its fiscal year 2024 annual report that “the overarching goal of the mental health court is to decrease the frequency of participants’ contact with the criminal justice system by providing judicial oversight to improve their social functioning with respect to employment, housing, treatment, and support services in the community.”

Johnston and her colleague, Conor Flynn, authored another study in 2017 that examined sentencing disparities for defendants between mental health courts and regular criminal dockets. The study, which examined a mental health court in Pennsylvania, found that “anticipated mental health court sentences typically exceed — by years — the supervisory periods that offenders would otherwise receive in a county criminal court.”

Part of what will decide the program’s success is the state’s attorney’s office’s willingness to allow defendants alternatives to prosecution.

Anne Arundel County State’s Attorney Anne Colt Leitess said in an interview she expects the new docket to function well, “as long as we can all agree and be on the same page. I think cooperation is what’s going to make it successful.”

She envisions the docket handling cases like mentally ill people who repeatedly trespass at BWI Marshall Airport.

“That’s an example of how this program could help, because we don’t want to jail homeless people. We want them to get services, housing,” said Leitess, a Democrat. “That’s an example of the type of cases I expect to see in this new program, people that are committing low-level offenses that need mental health treatment — the recurring incident that occurs because someone is homeless and mentally ill.”

The Office of the Public Defender, which represents the vast majority of defendants in mental health courts around the state, declined to comment.

Leitess’ office agreed to divert, or not prosecute for now, the case of the man who stole from the Wawa in Millersville.

In court Wednesday, the man appeared alongside his attorney and a representative from crisis response, who said he was doing well in treatment. The agency’s social workers helped him apply for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. He mentioned losing his wallet and living with a friend in Severna Park.

“It’s good. They’re great,” the man said of crisis response.

His attorney, Assistant Public Defender Tiffany Holley, asked Alexander to postpone his case until the next mental health court docket in February, “to see if (he) is still complying with all recommendations.”

Alexander agreed to that. “It sounds like you’re making good progress,” the judge said before calling the next case.

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