based on experience in all of the States. And it has now been adopted by-do you remember how many States, Mrs. Green-quite a number. Our State of Utah was one of the first to adopt it and we have had experience with it now for about 6 or 7 years. And the bugs have been worked out of it. I would just suggest you not go too far afield in trying to change it. We have had to make some changes to fit your local conditions up here and the Green bill, as drafted, in my opinion pretty well fits your situation. If you start coming up with a lot of ideas now and amplifications to it, I am afraid you are going to go so far afield you will not get anything. It is going to be tough enough to put over as we have it now. Do not go begging for too many psychiatrists, too many hospitals.

Mr. DERR. We agree with you but we do not want to miss the central theme of this presentation on mental illness. We feel the commissioner system does have a lot wanting.

Mr. ABBOTT. On that specific point: The people of the Territory of Alaska on Tuesday went to the polls to elect delegates to the constitutional convention. Alaska does not presently have that fundamental governmental subdivision, some 2,500 counties or parishes in the 48 United States, which supply the basic jurisdictional unit and including in many States, from my personal knowledge, county judges who are elected and who are paid and who handle probate matters, certain damage actions and tort actions and so on, and comprise a forum or create a forum for some of these matters.

States do have, of course, mental health boards, or, in the older language, insanity boards. You refer to the United States Commissioner system here which, the observation is made, is peculiarly in the hands of the people of the Territory and properly so. It has been editorialized on here in the Territory, the question of county governments, as one step you might take. Whether it is a county that is settled upon or some breakdown of your present judicial system action to be taken may result in a governmental subdivision creating a judicial or quasi-judicial office, thus a logical forum for some of these matters which are now committed to the United States Commissioner. Is that a correct summation of at least one direction your United States Commissioners problem might take?

Mr. DERR. Yes. I would like to ask our Delegate Bartlett a question. May I? I think you could settle this whole thing and get me out of here.

Mr. BARTLETT. As far as I am concerned.

[Laughter.]

Mr. DERR. If this bill is passed the way it is written will it do the job you know we need to be done in Alaska for Alaska? Mr. BARTLETT. I sincerely believe it will.

Mr. DERR. Then I wish I had not come up here at all.

Mr. O'BRIEN. I would like to join with what Mr. Dawson said. I think that was very timely advice. It was very difficult getting this bill out of the committee. We had lengthy hearings. Some of the amendments which went in were not in the judgment of some members good amendments but they were compromise amendments. We were trying to get a majority for the bill. If we open up this bill on the floor to a lot of amendments, I am terribly afraid of what will happen to the bill itself. I would prefer to see even some of the bugs stay in and changed in another year after we get the basic form that

70587-56-pt. 1—11

we need. That is my feeling and Mr. Dawson feels the same way, and other members of the committee.

Mrs. GREEN. I would join you, Mr. O'Brien. I think you are absolutely right. We are going to have a fight getting this bill through. We had better not muddy the waters. It is the best bill a majority of us felt could get out of the committee.

Mr. O'BRIEN. Even though we feel we are probably right in some of the things we are asking. But Congress is a strange and wondrous place and we have to compromise.

Thank you very much.

Mr. DERR. Thank you very much.

Mr. O'BRIEN. Theodore Stevens, United States attorney for the Fourth Judicial Division of the District of Alaska.

STATEMENT OF THEODORE F. STEVENS, UNITED STATES ATTORNEY, FOURTH JUDICIAL DIVISION, DISTRICT OF ALASKA; ACCOMPANIED BY GEORGE YEAGER, ASSISTANT UNITED STATES ATTORNEY

Mr. STEVENS. Mr. George Yeager is with me. He is assistant United States attorney. He is right here.

I think my statement, if the chairman will permit me to do so, I will ask be included in the record. It seems we have covered this question pretty well. It is something that even lawyers disagree on, Mr. Dawson. I do not agree with members of your committee who are attorneys as to the requirements of a jury for commitment in the Territory of Alaska.

I do have one suggestion here which comes under the same discussion Mrs. Green just finished, that is, in connection with the United States commissioners. That may be able to be straightened out later but the bill refers to a commissioner or the commissioner. In this division we have 13 commissioners. We could have up to 60, as I understand it, or more, in the division. And it would seem that the petition to determine a committed person should continue to get treatment or the application for commitment could be bounced around from one commissioner to another unless we tie down the commissioner in the first place who has the proper-I imagine it would be a question of venue in legal terms, as to where it should be brought in the first place, and if it was brought to him, the petition to determine whether the commitment should continue should be addressed to him also. That is the first part of my statement.

The second part concerns the jury provision. I believe that the members of your committee who put that provision in there, the amendment to Mrs. Green's original bill, which provides for the jury system, evidently believe that under the fifth amendment of the Constitution or perhaps the seventh, that the Federal Government is required to provide a trial by jury in order to satisfy due process before a person's liberty is taken from him. I disagree with their position. To my knowledge there has been no holding directly on the point although there are several cases in our local jurisdiction and in the court of appeals which would point toward the conclusion I am right and they are wrong, respectively.

I also agree with Mrs. Green perhaps this is not the time to question it entirely. I want to make clear, as my statement did, that these

I live

are my views, not the views of the Department of Justice. here and raise my family here, as Mr. Yeager pointed out very clearly before I came up here. He does also. And we believe we would hate to be a part of the proceedings that we are forced to attend from time to time under the present system which this amendment will revert to.

Mr. BARTLETT. Will you bear an interruption there?

Mr. STEVENS. Yes, sir.

Mr. BARTLETT. Notwithstanding, the Department of Justice knows you are appearing here and you have been given permission to record your views.

Mr. STEVENS. Yes; as long as they are personal and not the Department's views.

Mr. O'BRIEN. I might add, the Department of Justice was represented at our hearings and they were strongly in favor of the bill. I got the impression that the spokesmen for the Department had the same distaste for the function the Department was called upon to perform under our archaic proceedings.

Mr. STEVENS. I am pleased to hear that. We are so far from Washington, as you know, and these are purely local matters that, sometimes we think, the Department of Justice does not realize we get into so many times. As Mr. Derr stated, there were some 67 hearings from January 1, 1953, until August 31 of this year, and in the course of those hearings 1 member in my office was in attendance; 21 of the people were not committed, 14 were committed to the Veterans' Administration facilities, and the rest went to Morning side.

The way I like to put it is, there is no way you can put a foot in the stomach of a prosecuting attorney quicker than making him participate in an insanity hearing.

I am sincere. I really have a very great respect for juries, but not with insanity.

Mr. O'BRIEN. These six persons who are selected when they call for their mail, would they not be just as likely to send a sane person to an insane asylum as they would be to free a person who was insane? In other words, their judgment is not

Mr. STEVENS. That is true. I have witnessed a person I would consider normal-maybe my judgment is not too good--but a person I have considered normal gets on the stand. They get a little nervous. I am a little nervous right now although I am before juries constantly. Yet a man who is really insane, I have watched them and they are very lucid, as Mr. Abbott says.

I remember distinctly one gentleman I told Mr. Abbott about last night, that we were warned in advance he would be very lucid, very clear in his explanation of what had happened and that we should allow him to continue, in all events allow him to continue as long as he wanted because he would reach the peak of his development and then slide quickly. It was well over an hour, probably into 2 hours before that happened. But when it did happen it was very spectacular. The gentleman took off his shoe and began reading a poem about the Statue of Liberty and gave us a political speech and a couple of other things. It was something we expected but normally we do not have that advance warning and a hearing will take, I would say, 15 or 20 minutes, maybe an hour at the most.

Mr. O'BRIEN. You would not say that a delivery of a political speech was a symptom of insanity, would you? [Laughter.]

Mr. STEVENS. Please do not tell the Department about that slip. Mr. O'BRIEN. I am interested in this detention in jail. Are there instances where a person who has been found guilty-is that correct, to say, "found guilty" by a jury? Legally, that is so; is it not? Mr. STEVENS. I do not like to use that.

Mr. O'BRIEN. I mean legally they are charged with the crime of being mentally ill.

Mr. STEVENS. Not under our present law. They are charged with being in a status of an insane person and we do not like to get the idea across it is a crime.

Mr. O'BRIEN. I know it is not.

Mr. STEVENS. It is the same as a crime, but there is a defense attorney and an attorney present for the Government. Although neither the present bill or present law authorizes us to or compels us to attend we do attend to help the commissioner.

Mr. O'BRIEN. After the jury renders its judgment, there being no other place to put them, they put them in jail. Is there a considerable lapse of time sometimes before someone is able or ready to take them to Morningside?

Mr. STEVENS. We have had periods such as that. Our practice has been to take the person immediately to Morningside. It is a matter of catching the next plane. In the States the marshal is not allowed to travel on an airplane with his prisoner, and he then becomes in the same status as a prisoner. Here we are allowed to travel by plane and it is an overnight trip to Morningside.

Mr. O'BRIEN. Are they ever taken in the company of criminals being brought back to the States?

Mr. STEVENS. Yes, Mr. O'Brien. From the point of view of economy I think you could see that. We have people to take to Neil Island and people to take to Morningside and they go together on the same plane. They are not chained together or anything like that but in the same company.

Mr. O'BRIEN. I understand that. And the same guard.

The person who is brought before this jury, is the person brought there physically? Must he be present before this jury?

Mr. STEVENS. He does not have to be there and that is one thing that leads me to the conclusion you do not have to have a jury in the first place.

Mr. O'BRIEN. Mrs. Green asked a question of the previous witness. She wanted to know if any persons under 10 or under 5 were among those 67. Were there any children included?

Mr. STEVENS. Yes, sir; there were. There have been children. I have not participated in the ones that Mrs. Green referred to. Mr. Yeager did. He tells me in one instance he remembers at this time there was a child under five and the attorney who was appointed by the court to represent that child visited the family and also went over to the hospital. We do not put children in jail but we violate the law. We put them either in their own homes or in the custody of the hospital. Mr. O'BRIEN. Technically they should be put in jail.

Mr. STEVENS. Technically, right.

Mr. O'BRIEN. We had testimony before the committee-I do not know whether in your division or not-that there was a 20-month-old child went through this particular mill. That could happen, could it?

Mr. STEVENS. It could happen but would not happen here while I am here. They would not stay in jail very long.

Mr. O'BRIEN. Within the letter of the law.

Mr. STEVENS. The letter of the law would require it.

Mr. O'BRIEN. In other words, if you had a United States attorney who was not as humane as you are, who did not care, was callous, that could happen?

Mr. STEVENS. There are people who disagree with your statement, but that is true. I mean that I am not humane.

Mr. O'BRIEN. May I ask you this: In some remote areas would it be possible for a child, say, suffering with cerebral palsy, to be involved in this procedure?

Mr. STEVENS. This is the only procedure that we have in the Territory of Alaska for the commitment of a person to an insane asylum who does not have the ability to pay his own way. Our people can go out, I take it, to any private institution in the States. But anyone that wants to go to Morningside or use the facilities of the Territorial or Federal Government must go through that procedure unless we violate or deviate from the letter of the law because under the circumstances they would have to do it. I am reminded of a little boy I told Mr. Bartlett about, I believe, from Tanana who was approximately 18 years old. As I recall, he has been deserted by his mother and his father was unknown and he is in very difficult straits, definitely, as far as our information was concerned, in need of mental help. The Alaska Department of Public Health reached that conclusion, the local doctor and Native Service had reached that conclusion. We convened a jury here and the jury believed that the boy had explained his position correctly and released him. He went back to Tanana and they convened a jury there and it was one of the 5 to 1 situations Mr. Derr mentioned, and the boy was released. The last time I heard he had endangered all the people in Tanana Native Hospital by starting a bonfire.

Another time he had been taken in by a family, and they had a fish camp away from Tanana and he wandered away in the cold and walked back into Tanana some 18 miles almost completely nude. But during his lucid moments, as Mr. Abbott clearly stated, he could convince anyone he was a sane boy of 17 or 18.

Mr. O'BRIEN. Do you believe there are a number of people in the Territory who are suffering from concealed mental illnesses that are curable because of this system people do not want to expose their relatives to?

Mr. STEVENS. I believe that is probably true. I know of some people who have sent their loved ones out to an institution in the States and it cost them very dearly to keep them there because they do not want to go through this.

Mr. O'BRIEN. A person of normal income could practically figure on bankruptcy if they wanted to follow that procedure.

Mr. STEVENS. I believe that is correct. This is a very distasteful procedure and I believe the people who have served on insanity juries would agree. I do not think by and large they like the task. Deciding whether a man is guilty of a crime is one thing but deciding what the status of a man's mind is is another.

Mr. O'BRIEN. There is no one, apparently, in the entire chain of command including youself, members of the jury, Department of