Va. laws altered by Tech shootings
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By LILLIAN KAFKA
Published: April 16, 2008
One year after the worst mass killing in U.S. history, Virginia law is beginning to reflect a wide array of mental health and campus safety reforms.
Legislators changed the commitment criteria for the mentally ill, as well as many other laws that significantly change the state's mental health system during the 2007 session of the General Assembly.
Last week Gov. Timothy M. Kaine conducted a ceremonial bill signing for omnibus bills that inject $28 million into the state's mental health system and changed many mental health reporting requirements.
One of these changes includes a new policy for colleges and universities to notify the parent of a suicidal or potentially violent student that the student is receiving mental health treatment.
The changes are intended to prevent people who need mental health treatment from falling through the system's cracks, as did Seung-Hui Cho, the 23-year-old Virginia Tech student who shot dead 32 people on April 16, 2007.
He was declared mentally ill by a Virginia special justice but never received care for his illness.
After injuring dozens moreduring the shooting, Cho killed himself at the Blacksburg school's Norris Hall.
Higher learning institutions, starting Jan. 1, 2009, must develop a first warning and emergency notification system, per one of the bills passed this year in response to the incident. Two hours elapsed between the first gunshots at West Ambler Johnston Hall and the following shots at Norris Hall.
More bills institute changes to campus security and mental health treatment:
• A person may be taken into custody if he or she is mentally ill and there is a substantial likelihood that the person will harm himself or others.
• Health care providers shall provide all information necessary for magistrates and other court officials to perform their jobs related to commitment proceedings.
• Higher education institutions must release a student's educational record at a parent's request.
• Colleges and universities must establish threat assessment teams to adopt campus-wide education and violence prevention.
• Public and private colleges and universities may request complete student mental health records from originating schools.
• Magistrates may extend the times of emergency custody orders for two hours with good cause.
• Independent examiners and community service board employees must attend commitment hearings.
• Plans for discharging patients from state hospitals or training facilities shall identify services that the patient will be required to attend.
• Temporary detention orders are now considered admissible evidence.
• Magistrates must consider physician recommendations, past actions, medical records and affidavits when issuing a temporary detention order.
• Magistrates must issue temporary detention orders upon a recommendation of any responsible person, any treating physician or upon his own motion after an in-person evaluation by an employee or designee of the local community services board.
• Involuntary commitment hearings must be recorded separately.
• Anyone buying a gun must disclose his or her mental health background if he or she had ever been acquitted by reason of insanity, been adjudicated legally incompetent or mentally incapacitated or was involuntarily treated in an out-patient mental health facility.
• Involuntary inpatient and outpatient mental health treatment records must be forwarded to the Central Criminal Records Exchange and people ordered to treatment cannot purchase, possess or transport a firearm.
• Minors 14 years of age or older who are incapable of making an informed decision can be admitted into an inpatient treatment facility with parents application.
• A petition for involuntary commitment of a minor will be served to a minor and his or her parents.
• The amount of time to hold a hearing to commit a minor to an inpatient mental health facility against his or her objections is expanded from 72 hours to 96 hours.
• A court must appoint an attorney for a minor during involuntary commitment hearings.
Staff writer Lillian Kafka can be reached at 703-878-8065.
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