Luke Walters was playing a video game on a shared Xbox console at the Oregon State Hospital last year when his lawyer arrived for a rare visit.
Walters’ lawyer told him the state appeals court ruled that he had recovered from his mental illness, ordering officials to reconsider his commitment to the psychiatric facility.
The news was a surprise, Walters recalled. He thought his appeal had fizzled, like previous challenges to the varying degrees of state-ordered supervision he faced after pleading guilty except for insanity to a 2010 assault charge. Even after his lawyer handed him a stack of paperwork to prepare for his potential release, he offered caution.
“There’s no guarantees,” Walters recalled him saying.
The final obstacle to his release was the Psychiatric Security Review Board, a quasi-judicial agency that determines the level of supervision for people ordered to treatment for crimes they committed because of mental illness. The board is known for its cautious approach that tends to favor public safety over the liberty of people under its watch.
With Oregon’s mental health system in crisis after years of underfunding, advocates and patients say that the board’s public safety orientation is keeping people in treatment past their point of recovery while taking up resources badly needed by others.
Those criticisms come as the state is facing a shortage of beds in community-based mental health treatment settings. And the state hospital faces a federal contempt order over delays in admitting patients. Meanwhile, dozens of guilty except for insanity patients each month find themselves stuck in a bottleneck after they are deemed ready to continue treatment in a community-based setting. Instead, they remain stuck at the state hospital because of the lack of open beds.
Dave Boyer, managing attorney for advocacy group Disability Rights Oregon, blamed the situation on what he called the “lack of any sensible mental health care system” and the board’s restrictive posture. He said the board will pull people from community settings using “speculative assessments of danger.”
“Sometimes it’s folks who have been symptom free for years and years,” he said.
Alison Bort, the board’s executive director, emphasized the PSRB’s deliberative approach to people found guilty except for insanity, meaning they were determined to have a qualifying mental disorder at the time of their crime that made them a danger to others.
“This is a legal threshold that PSRB continues to evaluate at every hearing,” she wrote. “It is different from other populations at the hospital and requires a correspondingly careful and structured process before any transition back into the community.”
‘Lock people up’
The five-member board has authority over about 600 people, over half of whom live in community settings ranging from locked residential facilities to living on their own. The board imposes conditions on each person that are meant to help with their treatment. It can change their level of restrictions depending on how well their recovery is going.
That can mean sending them back to the state hospital, the most restrictive level of care. It can also mean the board discharges them early from their court-ordered commitment period.
Melissa Thompson, a sociology professor at Portland State University who studies criminology and mental illness, said every state has a law accounting for people who commit crimes because of a mental illness. Each law, she said, is intended to protect both public safety and defendants’ rights.
But she said the pendulum has been swinging toward public safety since the attempted assassination of then-President Ronald Reagan in 1981. The assailant, John Hinckley Jr., left Reagan seriously wounded, as well as others who were nearby.
Hinckley later revealed that he carried out the attack to impress actress Jodie Foster after seeing her in the movie “Taxi Driver.” He was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a psychiatric institution. He was discharged in 2016.
“As a country, we’ve tended to be okay if we have to lock people up longer than they need to be locked up just because we want to try to protect public safety,” Thompson said.
Early release is increasingly rare
The PSRB faced renewed scrutiny after Anthony Montwheeler in 2017 fatally stabbed his ex-wife, killed a resident of the town of Vale and then injured his wife in a head-on crash after kidnapping her and fleeing from police. Less than a month earlier, the PSRB had released him from its jurisdiction and discharged him from the state hospital after he admitted to faking mental illness for 20 years to avoid prison.
Since then, state figures show, the board has been more reluctant to discharge patients earlier than their court-ordered commitment (see graph). The board approved 20 early discharges 10 years ago. Since 2018, that number hasn’t risen above five. During the same time period, the board sent about 25 people on average each year back to the state hospital.
“Revocation decisions have not changed and continue to be based on whether an individual can be safely managed in the community under conditional release,” Bort wrote. She added that the PSRB discharges people from the state hospital “based on the person’s readiness and the availability of an appropriate placement.”
Other figures show that people under PSRB supervision rarely commit new crimes or misdemeanors, especially compared to people on parole.
Boyer, of Disability Rights Oregon, said that while the PSRB is expected to ensure less than 1% of people released from its supervision commit new crimes, the regular criminal justice system is not held to the same expectation.
At times, lawmakers have considered limiting the authority of the PSRB and how long someone can be under its watch. The most recent legislative attempt fizzled last year.
Jason Renaud, manager of the Mental Health Association of Portland, said the PSRB works well despite its restrictive approach. He said he would like to see Oregon’s guilty except for insanity law used more frequently because that would mean fewer mentally ill people being sent to prison.
“Adults are not happy with it,” he said. “But they don’t have other alternatives.”
‘Some sort of an ace’
These adults do have one alternative: challenging their PSRB supervision before the Oregon Court of Appeals.
Those who take this route have to convince the court that the PSRB got it wrong and they no longer have a “qualifying mental disorder” or are no longer a danger to others. Court filings from recent years reviewed by Street Roots show that this route usually doesn’t work. But it has worked for a handful of people.
In 2023, the court questioned the board’s reasoning after it ordered Nicholas Rinne to remain at the state hospital. Rinne had been under PSRB jurisdiction since 1999 when he was found guilty except for insanity for child sex abuse crimes and was committed to the state hospital for up to 60 years.
The board denied his petition for release, reasoning that his anxiety disorder qualified him for supervision because it meant he was less likely to seek treatment for his pedophilia if released. However, the board noted that his providers did not connect his pedophilia to his anxiety.
In another case that was more recent, the appeals court sided with Walters, the former state hospital patient, in June 2025. The court concluded that his treatment team as well as independent psychologists hired to evaluate Walters determined that he no longer had adjustment disorder with depressed mood. That was the basis of his supervision, and the court sent his case back to the PSRB for reconsideration.
Despite the court’s ruling, Walters remained waiting in the state hospital.
“(The PSRB) just wanted to go through all the paperwork and find some sort of an ace,” he said.
Finally, around Thanksgiving, hospital staff told him to pack up his things and get ready to leave. He described winning in appeals court as “really astounding” and vindication that he had been right and didn’t need to be in the state hospital.
‘Flip side of the coin’
On a sunny day at the top of Mt. Tabor Park, Walters, now 51, wore a black bomber jacket and a manicured gray goatee, a deck of Animal Guide Rune Cards tucked under his arm. He spoke with an affable eagerness as the conversation skipped from his time in the state hospital to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to his plans for the future.
Walters said that he maintains his wellness with art, Tai Chi and hacky sack, which he said combines physical activity and mindfulness practices in a supportive social setting. He said nature also helps.
When he was packing up his things to leave the state hospital, he said he packed up artwork he made from reused calendar images with encouraging quotes. He also grabbed his plants, including a fern and some spider plants.
Walters said the spider plants held a special significance for him. He recalled how in 2012 the hospital moved him and other patients to a different building. Hospital administration initially told him he couldn’t bring the spider plants and some orchids along with him, he said.
But he said he convinced the hospital to set up some racks in a quiet room where he could keep the plants.
“I went through experiences that most people would never want for themselves,” Walters said. “But the flip side of the coin is that it challenged me to become the man that I need to be to rise to the challenge of this life.”
While he was under PSRB supervision, he said he completed peer wellness training that he uses to support other people in the mental health system. He also served on state advisory councils representing people receiving mental health services and is a member of Disability Rights Oregon’s Mental Health Advisory Council.
Walters, who goes by the moniker “Luke A Shooting Star,” said his work in peer wellness often involves serving as an example or providing guidance. “But it’s like we’re learning from each other,” he added.
He said he hopes to build Ripples of Wellness, a group he started, into a larger organization run by people with experience in the mental health system to overcome what he said are the narrow pathways for recovery. He envisions that organization balancing out the PSRB’s focus on safety.
This article appears in April 15, 2026.