At age 35, she still sucks her thumb.
During a psychologist’s interview, Rachel Hurt — who has an IQ of 67 — asked for her “doll babies” and “Minnie Mouse” and began banging crayons on the table in response to questions about her mental capacity.
She also suffers from serious mental illness, including bipolar disorder and effects of a brain injury.
Yet more than five years after an assault case from Elizabethtown landed her in jail for a one-year sentence, Hurt remains in prison, for the last year held in isolation at Kentucky Correctional Institute for Women, with multiple state agencies unable to find a more suitable placement.
Her offense? Leaving a shelter and becoming homeless, thus violating conditions of her parole — which a judge found Hurt “lacks the capacity to understand, much less comply with.”
For the past year, Hurt has been in isolation, alone in a cell at the Oldham County prison because of threats of self-harm, according to the extensive court records of her case.
“She literally falls between the bureaucratic cracks,” Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd said in a recent order directing state officials to get her out of prison and into a suitable setting where Hurt can receive treatment for her mental illness and intellectual disabilities.
“All state agencies involved appear to recognize that Ms. Hurt’s situation is untenable and that she has severe mental health problems, and that it is wrong to be held in a prison setting in segregated confinement,” Shepherd wrote in his Nov. 14 order. “Unfortunately, each agency claims it is not within their jurisdiction or power to address Ms. Hurt’s dilemma.”
Still, Shepherd’s order says that “all parties recognized the need for an alternative mental health placement for Ms. Hurt and the court believes that the parties tried their best and worked in good faith to find such a placement.”
Despite those efforts, Hurt remains at the prison in isolation — confinement the judge said would be damaging for anyone, let alone someone with intellectual disabilities and mental illness.
“The type of supervision she is receiving now — alone in a prison cell — is undoubtedly causing her more harm than good,” Shepherd’s order said.
Her lawyer, Bailey Brown, with the state Department of Public Advocacy, who has been fighting in court to get Hurt out of prison, agrees.
“It is such a sad case and it’s frustrating,” Brown said. “We’ve criminalized certain aspects of mental health and this case is a glaring example of that.”
‘Finding the right place’
Repeated efforts to locate a placement have failed, because Hurt is listed as a “sex offender” for grabbing a caregiver’s breast and genital area during the assault that landed her in jail, and also because of her complex mental health and intellectual deficits, according to the court records of her case.
“Each one of those things just compounds finding the right place for that person,” said Steve Shannon, a longtime mental health advocate and former state behavioral health official.
Advocates say that too often in Kentucky, people with mental illness cycle through jails and prison as a default for proper treatment.
But Shannon said Hurt’s case appears to be unusually complicated.
“The more complex a person is, the more difficult it is to find someplace in the community,” he said.
Kungu Njuguna, policy strategist with the American Civil Liberties of Kentucky, said it comes down to resources.
“We aren’t doing enough to fund mental health services in Kentucky,” he said, noting that the matter has attracted the interest of federal authorities.
The U.S. Justice Department office of Civil Rights has notified Kentucky officials they may be violating the rights of persons in Louisville with mental illness by overuse of confinement in psychiatric hospitals or jails and prisons.
In a letter to Gov. Andy Beshear in August, federal officials warned they could file a lawsuit seeking to force changes if conditions don’t improve.
Hurt’s parole was revoked after a Louisville shelter where she had been placed after her release from jail asked her to leave and, unable to find another spot, she became homeless.
Meanwhile, Shepherd — clearly frustrated with the lack of action in Hurt’s case — has scheduled a hearing Friday, Dec. 6, to further discuss where things stand with officials from agencies that include the Justice Cabinet, the Parole Board, the Cabinet for Health and Family Services and the Corrections Department.
He noted that if another placement for Hurt isn’t found soon, she will be released from prison in April 2025 when her five-year mandatory supervision period ends.
“Her current conditions of confinement serve only to ensure Ms. Hurt walks out of prison more mentally fragile and unstable than when she walked into it, and such mental deterioration is evident by the relatively recent threats of self-harm,” the judge’s order said. “She will be a greater threat to public safety upon release than she was before her parole was revoked if immediate steps are not taken to place her in an appropriate treatment program.”
Hurt has no immediate family to look after her interests, her lawyer said, and has had a state-appointed guardian to manage her affairs all her adult life. Court records indicate she also had a state guardian as a child, but provide no further details.
Jail and hospitals
Court records indicate Hurt has been in and out of jail and hospitalized “countless times.”
She has a history of outbursts and aggressive, sometimes violent behavior in recent years that included police being called repeatedly to an Elizabethtown apartment where she lived under supervision by Communicare, the community mental health agency that serves the Hardin County region.
Police citations report Hurt has grabbed, scratched, bitten, pushed, punched and threatened caregivers. She once kicked a nurse at a local hospital in the stomach, causing her to vomit, a citation said.
Charges included harassment, assault and terroristic threatening, most resolved through guilty pleas and short or suspended jail sentences.
But things took a more serious turn in October 2018 when Hurt was charged with sexual abuse and assault after an altercation with a caregiver.
Hurt grabbed the worker around the breasts, genital area and buttocks and threatened to attack her sexually, saying “I am going to make you my b – – – -,” an Elizabethtown police citation said. She also spit on the worker. When other staff tried to intervene, Hurt bit one on the arm, the citation said.
That resulted in felony charges of sexual abuse and assault to which Hurt pleaded guilty in early 2020. She was sentenced to a year in jail, but was released with credit for more than a year served in jail after her arrest.
But her official status as a sex offender posed a new problem in finding a placement for her. And it also imposed a mandatory five-year parole period in which Hurt was required to find a place to live and report regularly to her parole officer.
Any violation could result in revocation — which happened just a few months after her release, according to court records.
Initially placed at the Salvation Army shelter in Louisville, Hurt was asked to leave and wound up in several spots including University of Louisville psychiatric services before becoming homeless. She also failed to report her whereabouts to her parole officer and call him daily, court records show.
Eventually, she ended up before the state Parole Board, which revoked her parole in August 2020, requiring her to serve five years in prison.
‘Malingering?’
Hurt was not capable of understanding her guilty plea to the sexual assault charge nor the consequences of her parole violation — going to prison for five years, her lawyer argued in a filing in Hardin Circuit Court, asking that her guilty plea be vacated.
That also would have given Hurt the potential to avoid classification as a sex offender, a major barrier to finding a placement outside prison.
But in 2022, Hardin Circuit Judge Kelly Mark Easton refused, saying Hurt entered a “knowing, intelligent and voluntary guilty plea” after causing injury and trauma to her victim.
In his order, Easton cited a victim’s statement that “Rachel knows how to play people and does well to portray the person that she wants you to like/feel sorry for. Rachel is also aware of her mental health diagnosis and plays that to her advantage.”
The judge added that the description of Rachel suggested “malingering,” or feigning illness or disability, saying she “may argue about her limitations when it suits her.”
In July 2024, Dr. Eric Drogin, a clinical and forensic psychologist, submitted a report after examining Hurt that rejected the possibility Hurt was “malingering.”
Her score for impairment should “alleviate any concerns she might be attempting to feign a functional disability in this regard,” his report said. It said Hurt was aware of charges against her but was unable to define the terms guilty or convicted.
Overall, she “lacks the capacity to appreciate the nature of the proceedings against her … or to participate rationally in her own defense,” the report said.
Hurt also is incapable of complying with requirements of the state’s sex offender program upon release from prison, Drogin’s report said.
The report followed an interview where the psychologist reported behaviors such as “thumb-sucking” and non-responsive replies to questions about her mental health such as “I gotta eat my cupcakes.”
She also said she wanted her doll babies and Minnie Mouse doll back and “was unable to be brought back to the topic at hand,” the report said.
‘What’s the plan?’
Judge Shepherd, in his order, is pushing state authorities to work together to come up with a better placement for Hurt, where she can get appropriate supervision and treatment without incarceration prior to her release date of April 2025.
Otherwise, the state is setting Hurt up for a “continuous cycle of recidivism,” his order said
As Shannon, the mental health advocate noted, “The clock is ticking,”
“I’d say, ‘What’s the plan,’” he asked. “To where will she be released? If she does this again, where do they place her?”
Brown, her lawyer, hopes Friday’s hearing yields some possible solutions.
“I do hope somehow we can find a way forward that’s somewhat positive for Rachel,” she said. “We have to do better.”
This story was originally published by the Kentucky Lantern.
