Texas is asking a federal appeals court to pause an order requiring the state to admit mentally incompetent jail detainees to psychiatric hospitals within 21 days, a mandate a district judge imposed after finding the current wait times unconstitutional.
State attorneys have asked the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to postpone the process of setting compliance benchmarks, according to court records reported by The Texas Tribune. Their argument is that the 21-day requirement would force the Health and Human Services Commission to begin what they describe as irreversible work rebuilding part of its system on a court-set schedule, and to spend unrecoverable funds on a remedy the appeals court may ultimately find the Constitution never required.
