A Connecticut woman was arrested and incarcerated in the state’s highest security mental health institution after having insufficient ID to show a motel clerk at the Microtel Inn in Montville. She then refused to identify herself to the police officers the clerk had called.

     She is not legally required to do so.

     The motel clerk had called the police and said that the woman would not leave the premises and that she had used rude language toward him. When the police arrived, they found her sitting on a bench in the lobby sipping coffee. She refused to give the officers her name or show them any identification and she was arrested, handcuffed, and taken to the station.

     Because refusing to identify oneself is not a crime, she was charged here with interfering with an officer and refusing to be fingerprinted. Bond was set at $500.00 and when she could not pay that, she was locked up.

     During a number of court appearances she underwent over the next month, she insisted she had done nothing wrong. Nevertheless, Superior Court Judge Jassette A. Henry raised her bail to $50,000. She was then involuntarily committed to the state’s highest security mental health institution, despite the fact she had never shown any impulse to harm herself or anyone else.

     She was then diagnosed with schizophrenia because of her “disorganized and tangential thinking that was loose in that it switched from topic to topic irrelevantly and quickly” and her inability to understand her legal situation.

     “No, I understand I’m under false arrest,” she said. “I understand I am under false arrest.”

     Psychotropic medication was recommended for her. When she resisted taking it, she was taken to probate court by the mental health facility, placed under a conservatorship, and an order was issued for forced involuntary medication.

     Eight months later, in June, 2024, newly appointed defense lawyer Michael Brown had a private psychiatric evaluation done on his client. It found her to be competent.

     The defense attorney filed a “public interest” appeal. Twenty days later the woman was finally released from custody.

     Brown pointed out that “she was never wrong about the core constitutional question aboutwhether she had to give her name to that officer.”

     The presiding judge at her final court appearances, Justice Stephen D. Ecker, voiced his opinion about the psychiatric diagnosis of the woman. “Her thinking is tangential because she keeps returning to the point that she is innocent and this is a false arrest. That is clearly a sign of schizophrenia because it is tangential thinking? That seems to me to be absurd.

     The idea that she is paranoid is a sign of her illness? She has just been involuntarily hospitalized by the force of the state. It is not an illness. It’s a rational assessment of your circumstances.”

     The psychiatrist who had diagnosed her with schizophrenia apparently thought otherwise.