State Hospital escape shows unacceptable acceptance by legislators

Randall Saito’s escape from the Hawaii State Hospital sent Gov. David Ige and state legislators running to the microphones to declare it “unacceptable.”

You think?

An admitted killer acquitted on an insanity plea waltzes off from the hospital, conveniently finds a backpack with a fake ID and getaway supplies, hails a cab to the airport, charters a flight to Maui and then flies commercial to California.

And the hospital doesn’t report him missing until two hours after he lands in San Jose — a guy found by the court to be a sexual sadist and necrophiliac, and described by a prosecutor as fitting the “classic serial killer” profile.

The trouble with cries of “unacceptable” by elected officials is they’ve accepted such lapses at the mental hospital for years.

As one legislator said, it’s happened before and it’ll happen again without big changes; if it were really unacceptable, fixes would have occurred after previous escapes — 17 in all since 2010.

Ige made some right moves, suspending seven State Hospital employees, ordering Attorney General Doug Chin to investigate, reviewing protocols and tightening patient privileges.

But Ige, Chin and Health Director Virginia Pressler made the wrong move when they used the ongoing investigation and privacy worries to avoid deeper answers about how this could have happened.

The state commits so many blunders on so many fronts that public trust is fading. Hiding behind walls of bureaucratic secrecy only feeds suspicions they’re covering up the truth rather than uncovering it.

Saito obviously had help, and there’s a pressing question of whether it came from inside the hospital, outside or both.

He clearly has an ability to charm the pants off hospital employees, and that’s not a figure of speech: He’s reported to have had at least three intimate relationships with staff.

In TV interviews since his capture, Saito said he was never mentally ill and suggested he gamed the court with the insanity defense after he shot and repeatedly stabbed Sandra Yamashiro in 1979.

This cries for lawmakers to take a closer look at rules for insanity pleas; Saito certainly seemed to have his wits about him in planning an intricate escape and orchestrating a PR campaign to justify himself.

We also need a better grasp of how to safely handle violent defendants who win insanity acquittals.

Hospital officials say their purpose is mental health care, not lockup like a prison, and the State Hospital wasn’t designed to handle dangerous patients from the criminal justice system.

This has brought suggestions that these patients be housed at a dedicated mental health wing of the prison, but public safety officials say they’re not equipped for psychiatric care.

This conflict of purpose won’t be fully resolved even with a more secure $160 million addition to the State Hospital due for completion in 2021.

Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com.