Advocacy groups say Lewiston shooting could have been prevented if mental health laws had not been fully utilized

John Nutting, policy director for the Maine chapter of the National Silence Breaking Coalition, spoke about the state’s progressive treatment program during a press conference at the Maine Statehouse on Friday. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal

Members of a national advocacy group on Friday urged state officials to expand access to Maine’s Progressive Treatment Program, a law that could be used to prevent violent acts like the Lewiston shooting but that they say police are underusing.

The National Breaking the Silence Coalition has called on the commission investigating the shootings to investigate why no one used the law to get suspect Robert Card medical treatment before he killed 18 people last October, former state Rep. John Nutting said at a press conference at the State Capitol on Friday morning.

“I don’t want Maine to just worry about how quickly we can respond to the next tragedy,” Nutting said, “I want them to focus on preventing the next tragedy.”

Maine’s progressive treatment program, also known as the “green paper” program, allows health care providers, police or legal guardians of patients with severe mental illnesses who are “likely to cause significant harm” to seek a court order requiring them to follow a prescribed treatment plan. If a patient refuses treatment, they can be involuntarily hospitalized.

While an earlier, more limited law could only be enforced immediately after hospitalization, a new law passed in 2010 allows police and medical providers to use the law preemptively before forcibly hospitalizing a patient under Maine’s stricter “blue paper” law.

But progressive treatment programs are often used only after someone has committed a crime but has been found not to be criminally responsible, said Nutting, who said the Maine Department of Health and Human Services has resisted his calls to train police to use the Green Paper process more aggressively.

Some advocates for people with mental illness say the expansion of forced treatment methods like progressive treatment programs violates patients’ rights. They argue that there is limited evidence that forced programs are effective and that they may actually discourage people from seeking treatment.

But Nutting and other speakers said Friday that the current system fails to help people who don’t recognize they’re suffering from mental illness and refuse treatment.

“We have nothing to lose,” said Joe Pickering, who spoke of the difficulties of getting his son Chris access to mental health treatment before his accidental death in 2020. “We’ve already lost.”

The group asked to speak publicly before the Lewiston committee, but Nutting said he was asked to submit written materials instead. In addition to asking the committee to expand its scope of operations, the group also called on officials to train police on the expanded Green Paper law and to fund community-level mental health resources needed to support patients in the program.

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