Forensic psychologist raises concerns, calls for more guidelines to Kentucky's Logan's Law

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — Kentucky legislators submitted the official filing for Logan's Law Friday, but some psychology professionals raise some concerns about the bill, saying it needs more guidelines.

Lauren Kaplan is a forensic phycologist, and she has her own practice.

Forensic psychologists make suggestions to the court during a trial and conduct evaluations to determine mental competency to advise courts of whether a person is mentally stable enough to withstand trial.

Kaplan said she also gives expert testimony to expand on mental evaluations.

Kentucky Republican representatives T.J. Roberts and Dan Fister push HB422 in hopes of preventing violent criminals who are serving life sentences from being eligible for parole before serving at least 85 percent of their sentence.

"It's unclear how this would play out," Kaplan said.

Lawmakers said the bill closes loopholes that allowed Ronald Exantus to be released from prison early before he served a majority of his sentence for the murder of six-year-old Logan Tipton.

Exantus was found not guilty for reason of insanity on the murder charge, but he was found guilty but mentally ill on two counts of assault in 2018 after breaking into the Tipton's family home, stabbing and killing Logan and attacking the child's sister and father in 2015.

The bill also requires treating professionals to request involuntary hospitalization for violent offenders who are found guilty but mentally ill. This would start the legal process for possible hospitalization either before during or after someone serves their time.

Whether a person is hospitalized would then be decided in court. That's the part of the bill that Kaplan raises concerns about.

The bill also amends the not guilty for reason of insanity plea from KRS 504.060 and KRS 504.120.

Those are the parts of the bill Kaplan takes issue with.

"Indiscriminate practices on the back end after they serve their time if it's not applied correctly could lead to these people being involuntarily committed when maybe they need to or maybe they do not need to, which is a concern," she said.

She explained that a lot of psychological conditions can be considered as mental illnesses. She believes the law needs a clearer definition to distinguish between mental illness and insanity.

She also said the amendments made in the bill removes insanity as a plea, which she sees as problematic. She said a person who lacks the necessary mental capacity to understand the wrongfulness of their actions or to distinguish right from wrong should be able to plea insanity.

Kaplan also said Kentucky does not have a forensic monitoring system in place that keeps track of a person's mental health after they're released.

She fears that without guardrails in place, people could be sent to psychiatric hospitals for undetermined periods of time and lack the mental health supports that they need to recover.

"What happens after they're released from the hospital? What about those that go to the hospital for one month versus those that go for 10 years. Where is the monitoring? Are they just released back into the community? Do they then have to have those wrap around services that they would have to have under the current GBMI statutes, or is that skipped because they had to go to the hospital?

WDRB reached out to Fister regarding the concerns but has yet to hear back.

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