A Tame Deer: Undiagnosed Mental Illness

In the late 1970s, President Jimmie Carter promoted community mental health centers, and Americas prison population dropped for the only time in our history. His vision was undone by the next administration. Human behavior is motivated from within by emotion, the bad as well as the good. Matt Granger struggled for four decades with perplexing, disgusting misbehavior, indecent exposure, and sexual agressiveness, not knowing why he lived with general dissatisfaction and the unholy urge to do something. He even tried eight years in prison, idealistically believing that the American Department of Corrections did as advertised and the nation had corrections professionals. Realizing that the justice sysytem and Corrections are shams, he managed himself as best he could, acting-out anonymously, since courts and prisons did not do any good. Nobody knew what he did at random, except for innocent victims.

Marine Corps Sergeant R. Warren Schuenemann received the Purple Heart and medals for valor in Vietnam. Graduating summa cum laude from the University of Houston he worked as a licensed plumber in two states and with a Secret Security clearance on military bases. His marriage solemnized in the Salt Lake Temple produced one son. The American Correctional Association published an article of his on sex offender treatment in a criminal justice textbook. Twice put in prison, Warren first received a 99 year sentence for burglary from a Dallas jury, overturned by the Texas Supreme Court due to prosecutor misconduct. After seeing the state’s antics, the witness refused to testify again and told prosecutors to go to hell. Warren, however, spent eight years in the Department of Corrections without rehabilitation or a diagnosis of his behavior problems. The second incarceration: a police chief promised on videotape emphasis on reformation and named the state school doctors. Relying on promises, Warren pled no contest to everything prosecutors filed. The judge labelled him a ’career criminal’ and ’worst offender’ although he did not come up to average offender criteria. There was not so much as a scratch or a dirty word. The judge made up a state record 69 year sentence, cute in media headlines for a sex offender. Appeal judges ignored his exceptional rehabilitation potential, major mental illness, and post-traumatic stress disorder, not just from Vietnam, but from severe childhood abuse, as they focused on the type of crime. The case and videotape went all the way to the US Supreme Court. After 26 more years in prison, Warren came up for parole. The Board in the hearing said all he had to do was retake the sex offender school he had graduated from 21 years earlier. Three hours later, a smirking parole officer handed him the Board’s official ten year sentence.