Montford inmate with history of mental illness was allowed to represent self

Oct. 19--Benjamin McCoin had a tattoo with Elaine's name on his left arm when he died following a struggle with detention officers at the Montford Psychiatric Unit earlier this year.

But it was another woman's name, that of his ex-wife Jeanette White, and some dynamite that would put the paranoid schizophrenic behind bars for attempted capital murder.

According to court documents and family members, on the evening of Sept. 15, 1992, McCoin placed some dynamite under the mobile home of his ex-wife, near her bedroom. When it exploded, the blast blew a hole in the floor, injuring White, her husband and their 14-year-old son.

McCoin's family members dispute that anyone was actually hurt.

"There was nobody that got a scratch," said Jackie McCoin, his older brother. "It was a low amount of dynamite. My brother, if he had wanted to kill 'em, he would have. It was just to scare 'em."

McCoin, who owned Cripple Construction Co., was familiar with explosives.

A Red River County grand jury indicted the younger McCoin two years later.

That's where the story gets a little murky.

The court records readily available are not entirely clear, but McCoin served time in federal prison for intimidating witnesses and making threats.

More than 20 years later, U.S. District Attorney Richard Lee Moore, the prosecuting attorney, remembers McCoin as a serial filer, filing pro se this complaint and that.

"He was suing judges and prosecutors," Moore said.

And, he was threatening them, too.

"He started filing threatening letters to a federal judge, and ATF agents, too," Moore recalled.

McCoin received at least two psychiatric evaluations, was declared not competent to stand trial and was sent to a federal mental treatment facility before the government vacated the case, court documents show.

Then McCoin fell back into the hands of county prosecutors in Red River. The court would allow McCoin to represent himself, and it handed him a 99-year sentence.

"He was so insane; he thought he could be a lawyer watching it on TV," said Jackie McCoin, who lives just north of Detroit, Texas.

"He should have never been tried for that. He should have been sent to an insane asylum."

'Assembly line corrections'

McCoin's story is hardly unique.

The prevalence of mental health problems among inmates has led some advocates to call the nation's jails and prisons the new asylums.

A 2006 Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated that roughly one in four jail inmates and 15 percent of state inmates have a psychotic disorder. In 2012, there were an estimated 356,000 inmates with severe mental illness in prisons and jails across the country.

"There's a lot of really tragic stories where you hear about mental health intersecting with the justice system," said Kate Murthy, a mental health policy fellow with the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

"I think a large part of it is people who have serious mental illness come into contact with police officers more often."

And, when the mentally ill do encounter law enforcement, many agents are not properly trained to deal with them. The Texas chapter of the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees is advocating for greater training for the state's correctional officers.

Lance Lowry, president of the state chapter, would like to see the Texas Department of Criminal Justice raise the number of training hours from two to 40. On the whole, Texas correctional officers receive 73 fewer hours of training than do their counterparts in other states, Lowry added.

"Lots of the problems I'm seeing are with the overall level of training," Lowry said.

"The assembly line corrections we have in the state is a mess."

'Changing the system'

Mental illness is no stranger to the McCoin family.

Several members, Jackie McCoin said, have suffered from mental illness, including a grandparent, niece and brother, who has been successfully treated for 30 years.

"It runs in the family," Jackie McCoin said.

McCoin's psychosis, his older brother Jackie McCoin said, didn't manifest until his mid-30s, after experimenting with drugs.

It's uncertain what treatment, if any, McCoin had received prior to being incarcerated.

After being sentenced in 2000, McCoin was moved in January to Montford, one of three state psychiatric facilities.

Jackie McCoin has sought answers from the state about his brother's death. But the answers, he said, have been slow in coming.

"They spent eight pages telling me they couldn't tell me anything," Jackie McCoin said.

He's called a couple of attorneys, he said, hoping to make sense of the tragedy, but that left him despondent.

"I'm not as much interested in money as I am in changing the system," Jackie McCoin said. "An attorney told me, 'Well, that'll never happen.'

"I just think that insane people shouldn't be mixed with other people. That's what I'd like to see happen out of his death."

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