Many of the Dix Hospital residents are employed in off-campus jobs in preparation for their return to society. A usually reliable source has related that the hospital staff has met with resistance from off-campus employers when they were told of Michael Hayes’ “sanitized” history.
On 17 July 1988, Michael Hayes assaulted 24 people with a firearm, 9 were wounded, 4 fatally. At trial, Michael Hayes was advantaged by the jury’s anti-death penalty mind-set well before the issue became a popular cause celebre. To avoid a decision on the death penalty the jury opted for the verdict Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity and he was committed to Dorothea Dix Hospital.
The Dix psychiatric staff has been endeavoring to advance “forensic” unit residents, principally Michael Hayes and Wendell Williamson, through a hospital designed program which will lead to their eventual release. Williamson’s advance was somewhat compromised by his recent conjugal absence. The hospital’s psychiatric spokesman hopes to have Hayes employed off-campus for one, two or three months, so that he can testify to a Superior Court Judge that Hayes has been mingling with society for that period of time and has not killed anyone and that is proof that it is safe to release him
The Dix staff has historically resisted housing insanity acquitees in a restricted forensic environment, complaining that “it was too much like a prison”. Preferring instead to house the sociopaths in wards with more benign residents.
From his commitment in 1988 to November 1991, Michel Hayes enjoyed a more beneficial lifestyle than he had ever known. Endowed with a Social Security Disability allowance – since discontinued - and a salary from his job in the hospital canteen Hayes lived the life of the fabled Riley. Weekly off-campus technician escorted shopping trips and meals in Cameron Village financed by his constantly overdrawn account at the bank there. On the Saturday of Armistice Day weekend, with his hospital-married second wife providing transportation, Hayes absented himself from the Dix campus for the entire day. Some low level employee alerted the Raleigh police, resulting in a statewide brouhaha. The adverse publicity prompted the AG’s office to caution the Mental Health administration about the potential liability to which the State was being exposed. The then Secretary of Human Resources issued a memorandum ordering that, henceforth, forensic residents would be allowed off-campus only by the explicit order of a Superior Court Judge.
The hospital’s catering to Hayes allowed him to sire two illegitimate children on the hospital grounds. This impropriety was revealed to the Court at his annual rehearing by other sources while the Dix staff was representing him to be a model citizen. Periodically during Hayes’ tenure at Dix outside evaluators have determined, mainly through the Minnesota Mutifacic Personality Inventory test, that he is mentally ill, according to the North Carolina statute, and subsequently dangerous.
rbnicholson@earthlink.net
More information about this case can be found at:
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=nc&vol=appeals2000/appeals0718/&invol=hayes
