When Dr. Deborah Collins returned to Washington County Jail to reevaluate Morgan in preparation for her reverse waiver hearing, Morgan admitted that for the first time in her life she could not control the voices—when she told them to be quiet, they wouldn’t listen to her—and that sometimes the walls looked like they were closing in. All around her, people were changing shape, their bodies shuddering and swelling, falling apart midstride. The other inmates’ eyes shifted around their faces as they stared at her.
In brighter news, Morgan gushed, Snape, the antihero from the Harry Potter books, had come to visit her iso-pod—and had kept her awake until three o’clock in the morning. Morgan explained that she always kept a bed ready for him.
Another doctor would later describe Morgan’s iso-pod as a kind of hallucinatory bed-and-breakfast, saying, “She seems to feed these people who are visiting—she’s making sure they’re getting proper sleep—she acts as a hostess to make sure they are comfortable.”
As Collins later testified, “She wasn’t all there.”
Between Tony’s new baby and his work, it felt like there weren’t enough hours in the day. Prior to Morgan’s case, he had always liked reading to his older son at night. But now he felt himself losing patience if his son picked books with lots of pages. Tony wanted to go to sleep and dream about the case so he could wake up and think about it more. He was stressed—and when Tony was stressed, he drove to Taco Bell.
Through the drive-through microphone, Tony ordered three Doritos Locos Tacos with nachos on the side. For dignity’s sake, he added a large Diet Coke to the order.
Later, Tony took a long suck on his jumbo soda, ruminating on the reverse waiver. The last thing he wanted was a jury trial. He hadn’t expected the community to hate his twelve-year-old client, a little girl with mental illness, even more than it had hated Billy Brookes. The issue of schizophrenia was stickier than he’d expected, too. Morgan had been diagnosed by a state-run facility; her schizophrenia was not a fabrication. But he needed to be careful about how much he raised the issue in court. In reverse waiver situations, overemphasizing a defendant’s mental illness risked painting a picture of someone who couldn’t get better. “It’s hard to make the argument that you should focus on rehabilitation if they can’t be rehabilitated—then punishment really kicks in,” said Marsha Levick, cofounder of the Juvenile Law Center. “Good advocates, good lawyers, walk that line.”
On June 17, 2015, the first day of the reverse waiver hearing, Matt and Angie crossed the parking lot to the courthouse, passing a sea of tough-on-crime bumper stickers.
POLICE LIVES MATTER.
ADULT CRIME, ADULT TIME.
As guards led Morgan into the courtroom, her father, Matt, looked away, not wanting to see the rough way they handled his daughter. But Angie bravely made eye contact with Morgan, signaling her love. Morgan later recalled how it seemed like the female guards hated her the most, slapping at her unnecessarily during the pat-down and digging their long fingernails deep into Morgan’s shoulder when it was time to put on the handcuffs.
As with their previous motions, Tony and Donna’s case rested on getting Morgan medical treatment that would be unavailable to her in the adult system. Anticipating this, state prosecutors opened the hearing by objecting to any articles on schizophrenia being entered into court record, calling the research “hearsay.” Bohren overruled the objection. But the DA’s resistance to considering Morgan’s case in the context of her schizophrenia echoed widespread belief among Wisconsin voters, and arguably across the country, that being “crazy” was a “get out of jail free” card fabricated to manipulate the legal system.
Tony called his first witness, Dr. Deborah Collins, who had evaluated Morgan several times during her incarceration. “The quicker it’s treated,” Collins said of schizophrenia, “the more you can mitigate or attempt to mitigate what’s anticipated to be a chronic course. So you want to intervene as early as possible.”
In addition to medication, Collins explained, Morgan needed talk therapy to help her distinguish between hallucinations and real life. Socialization was also important. People with major mental illnesses were deficient in social skills, but social skills could be learned, so long as the individual with mental illness was exposed to peer interaction. As of that day, Collins testified, Morgan lacked any therapeutic or social support outside of her hallucinations. “They are her only friends.” But she added that Morgan’s history of friendships, regardless of how they had turned out, boded well in terms of her ability to form bonds. If Bohren could find it in his heart to move Morgan into a healthy, age-appropriate environment, with therapeutic resources tailored to her special needs, Morgan might still lead “a good, productive life.”
Bohren interjected to ask Collins what might occur on Morgan’s seventeenth birthday, “from a treatment and community standpoint.”
If Morgan were to be tried in juvenile court, she would age out of the system in around four years—what then?
Collins explained that juvenile courts actually afforded greater opportunity for long-term supervision than the adult prison system. After serving four years at Copper Lake School for Girls, Morgan could proceed into the Serious Juvenile Offender Program, where she could hypothetically be detained until the age of twenty-five. A civil commitment order would ensure that she took her medication as prescribed, and if for some reason she refused, antipsychotic drugs could be legally injected. In contrast, parole from an adult prison didn’t offer as much comprehensive supervision. As Dr. Collins testified, “Probation officers can’t force someone to take medication.”
During cross-examination, prosecutors dwelled on Morgan’s high IQ, arguing that her intelligence made her especially dangerous. In response, Tony and Donna reminded the court that Morgan had planned to walk three hundred miles to an imaginary castle, bringing only a few water bottles and M&M bars for provisions. She was not exactly a criminal mastermind. Next, DA Szczupakiewicz seized on the chronic nature of Morgan’s disease, contending that because her schizophrenia would never go away, she would always be dangerous.
Later in the hearing, Dr. Robbins described how in adult prisons, people with schizophrenia were often attacked, raped, or otherwise exploited by their fellow inmates. But prosecutors argued that if people with schizophrenia were all being mistreated in the prison system, then Morgan’s case was not, in fact, unique. She did not warrant any special accommodation. She should be treated like everybody else.
Robbins answered, “This is not ‘usual’ schizophrenia. It is really rare to have schizophrenia have an onset this early. I’ve never seen it before.”
Prosecutors pivoted to Morgan’s hallucinations, emphasizing the names of certain hallucinations, which they said corresponded to the names of various children’s book villains who ended up dead at the end of their stories—this, the state seemed to imply, was yet another sign that Morgan was dangerous; since her hallucinations were named after dead fictional characters, she might cause someone’s death.
“Take my word for this when I tell you that Voldie, Snape, and Bellatrix all are dead by the end of the Harry Potter series,” Szczupakiewicz said while questioning Robbins. Is there any significance to the fact that her imaginary friends are all dead fictional characters?”
The logic was hard to follow, and Robbins took a moment to answer: “I don’t honestly know the significance of this ‘dead’ part. They are not dead to Morgan. So, I don’t know that’s of significance.”
What was of significance, in Robbins’s opinion, was that “the Department of Corrections is going to have a great deal of difficulty figuring out how to manage Morgan, because it’s such a poor fit … She’s going to have a harder time reading people, I think there’s a certain naïveté that often goes with somebody who has schizophrenia, and I think because she is going to act differently and say things that are different, it will likely lead to her being bullied.” Robbins concluded, “The case should be reverse waived.”
Next, Tony and Donna turned their attention to the mistaken assumption that adult prosecution benefited the community and curtailed juvenile crime. The reality was stark; under scrutiny, adult prosecution of minors did not make sense at all. It cost taxpayers more than the alternative; it increased recidivism rates; it flew in the face of brain science—and by withholding special services from minors, it also failed to address the underlying issues that motivated the crime to begin with, which in turn led to more crime. All of this had been conclusively proven by decades of scientific research.
In a brief submitted to the court, Morgan’s legal team would cite the Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Roper v. Simmons:
The reality that juveniles still struggle to define their identity means it is less supportable to conclude that even a heinous crime committed by a juvenile is evidence of irretrievably depraved character.… Only a relatively small proportion of adolescents who experiment in risky or illegal activities develop entrenched patterns of problem behavior that persist into adulthood.
“In Ms. Geyser’s case,” Tony concluded, “her culpability level is reduced even further, because she suffers from an organic mental health condition that is entirely outside of her control.”
Toward the end of Morgan’s reverse waiver hearing, Matt watched from the back of the courtroom as Tony and Donna finished their case and felt hope surge in his chest. To him, Morgan’s lawyers sounded like winners.
Matt turned to Angie and said, “He did it, we won.”
But Angie knew better than to count her chickens. She turned her attention to Judge Bohren. Everything hinged on his decision, and for that (due to the law’s slow bureaucracy, which had so far prolonged the case two years), they would need to wait.
In the meantime, Tony and Donna filed a memorandum imploring Judge Bohren to be merciful:
For most of the last year, Morgan has languished in the Washington County Jail.… [S]he has not seen the sun and she has rarely breathed fresh air. These conditions would cripple the most hardened adult offender. A twelve-year-old child, especially one with emerging schizophrenia, should never be subjected to this type of placement.… [T]his Court has seen Morgan. She is a small, fragile child who spends most of her time in court seemingly distracted by sounds and sights that she alone detects.… [S]he has been physically escorted into every court appearance, her hands shackled to her waist[.] Morgan has become a public spectacle, with onlookers being denied entry to court because of capacity restrictions. The private details of her life and her emerging mental health condition are aired in a public “viewing room” in the basement of the courthouse. At even the most routine appearances, Morgan has found herself on the front pages of newspapers and websites. She has been assailed through social media, with her face published for the world to see. Morgan’s case has received international attention, as Al Jazeera, BBC, Nancy Grace, Dr. Drew, and countless other outlets have run stories and features on Morgan. She has been portrayed alternatively as a sophisticated adult criminal or, at worst, a sadistic, cruel animal.… [T]he undersigned is aware of no other girl as young as Morgan who has ever been prosecuted in Wisconsin’s adult court system.
In turn, the district attorney’s office submitted its own closing argument on July 27, 2015, calling Tony’s assertion that juveniles should not be tried in adult court as “absurd.”
How do we, as a society, teach our children? We do so through a combination of life lessons and punishment.… [Y]es, in a normal child-rearing situation the punishment is likely to take the form of grounding or the like, but there is punishment nonetheless. In a situation where a crime of the gravity of attempted homicide is involved, society steps in and metes out the needed punishment … to reinforce to a child what not to do.
“The two co-actors did not act like children,” state prosecutors concluded. “The legislature has clearly indicated that a court should error [sic] on the side of maintaining adult jurisdiction.”
The Geysers and Weiers would return to court on August 10, 2015, to hear Bohren’s ruling on both Morgan and Anissa’s reverse waiver hearings.