Woman Facing Attempted Child-Kidnapping Charge Is Judged Incompetent to Stand Trial for Now

Circuit Judge Terence Perkins all but formally ratified the findings of Dr. Roger Davis, a Jacksonville psychologist, who found Jean-Pierre Theolin incompetent after evaluating her at the Flagler County jail. Perkins was ready to sign the order of incompetency today. He did not do so only because Jean-Pierre Theolin faces a burglary charge in Volusia County, where Circuit Judge Dennis Craig also ordered her competency evaluated by Davis. She was out on bond on that charge. Craig revoked her bond on March 4 following the Palm Coast arrest.

The same mental-health evaluation report applies to both cases. Perkins wanted to ensure that Craig would agree to consolidating both cases for the purpose of the commitment order to a state hospital. “We’d want to order it at the same time so she could receive her treatment at the same time and be restored to competency as soon as we can,” Perkins said.

On March 3 Jean-Pierre Theolin walked into two W-Section homes uninvited and in one case allegedly attempted to snatch a young child away from his mother, insisting that the child was hers. She ran away from both properties and was later arrested at a nearby street corner. She declined to speak with the arresting deputies.

The next day Bill Bookhammer, her court-appointed public defender, filed a suggestion of mental incompetency to stand trial, listing the usual criteria for incompetence she would meet if she were to be evaluated, among them the inability to appreciate the charges against her or the potential penalties–and her inability to disclose to Bookhammer the pertinent facts surrounding the alleged offenses.

Bookhammer’s filing also reveals that Jean-Pierre Theolin “has previously been declared incompetent to proceed and has a long history of mental illness.”

Jean-Pierre Theolin herself refused to appear for her court hearing early this afternoon. “I attempted to explain it but she refuses pretty much everything,” a corrections deputy at the county jail told Perkins through a video link from the room where defendants usually appear. “She said no thank you.” The corrections deputy said Jean-Pierre Theolin understood what she was being told, but “she wouldn’t even uncover her head.”

The defense and Assistant State Prosecutor Melissa Clark had no objections to the judge’s order. “As long as you’re intending on sending her to the state hospital, because obviously that’s what the report indicates as well, that’s all we’re asking for,” Clark said.

“Based on that evaluation, I’m going to find her incompetent, to proceed,” the judge said, “I’m going to remand her for restoration treatment so that she can be restored to competency.”

Eduardo Freeman, Jean-Pierre Theolin’s father, appeared at today’s hearing from his home and referred to his daughter’s previous institutionalization. He was concerned about her being committed to Florida State Hospital in Chattahoochee, 264 miles–or four and a half hours–away from Palm Coast.

“Under the statute, I’m told they’re the only ones that can do that,” Perkins said of state hospitals capable of restoring individuals to competency.

“She had to stay at the state hospital in Macclenny,” Freeman said, referring to the institution just east of Jacksonville, about an hour and a half from Palm Coast. “It was easy for us to go there when we went to visit her. But the one in Chattahoochee, that’s about five hours. That’s where you want to send her?”

“It doesn’t matter where I want to send her. That’s where she goes,” Perkins said. “Then if they feel like other services would be necessary, they have the ability to send mer to other facilities. But my understanding is, they’ll treat her there in an attempt to restore her competency as quickly as possible.”

Melissa Eugley, the forensics director at Stewart Marchman Act Behavioral Healthcare, a contractor with the court system, said Jean-Pierre Theolin will end up either at the hospital in Chattahoochee or at the South Florida Evaluation and Treatment Center south of Homestead–Florida’s only two state hospitals with female beds. “If she’s doing well but not restored,” Eugley said, “they may do what’s called the civil step-down, then they could transfer her to Macclenny at that point. But initially, right, she will need to go to either Chattahoochee or South Florida.”




Defendants in Jean-Pierre Theolin’s situation are almost always restored to competency one way or the other, usually through heavy medication, and trial proceedings resume. The result is not necessarily what a lay person would consider “competency.”

Defendants return to court either semi-catatonic or still clearly disoriented, bewildered or defiant. But Florida law recognizes no middle ground between competency and incompetency: a defendant is either competent to stand trial or not, and if judged competent, defense attorneys are barred from making still-obvious mental health limitations a factor in their defense, unless they opt for the insanity defense. In that case, they have to prove that the defendant was clinically and certifiably insane at the time of the alleged offense–an extremely high bar to meet in Florida courts. As a result, defendants with serious mental incapacities–among them, in Flagler, David Snelgrove, James McDevitt, Joseph Bova, Jonathan Canales–end up serving life sentences or close to life, their capacities made irrelevant by the judgments. Studies suggest that between 10 and 15 percent of state prison inmates suffer from severe mental illness.

Jean-Pierre Theolin’s first run-in with the law in Flagler dates back to 2015, when she was arrested on a shoplifting charge at Kohl’s. The felony charge was reduced to a misdemeanor, then dropped.