Practice areas · 8 / 12

Mental Health

Ms. Jakobe is a strong advocate for mental health. It is in the news every day, and for good reason: nearly everyone struggles with it at some point, or loves someone who does: a parent, a child, a spouse, a coworker, a friend. There is nothing to be ashamed of in that. A mental health condition is as real as cancer, and some can be seen on a brain scan. It calls for the same response: awareness, treatment, and gentleness toward the people living with it. Yet it still goes unspoken in the place it matters most, a criminal courtroom, where a person’s worst moment is judged without any account of what led to it.

Many of the reasons people use drugs and alcohol, and many of the reasons people end up charged with a crime, trace back to mental health struggles that were never recognized or never treated. Depression, anxiety, trauma, and the aftermath of abuse or military service do not excuse conduct, but they explain it, and an explanation changes how a prosecutor and a judge see a case. Arizona’s courts have ways to account for it: a competency evaluation when a client cannot meaningfully take part in the case; treatment-based alternatives and mental health courts in place of incarceration; and, at sentencing, a full presentation of what the client has been carrying.

Ms. Jakobe treats a client’s mental health as part of the case from the first meeting, with the same care and discretion as anything else a client tells her. Where an evaluation will help, she arranges it; where treatment is the better answer than a cell, she makes that case; and where the struggle explains the conduct, she makes sure the court hears it. A client who tells Ms. Jakobe the truth about what they are going through is not judged for it. They are better defended because of it.