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“It’s a gamble to say that a child — he’s a child — could be cured, treated, made safe.”

(Nov. 15, 2017) Judge Paul F. Sheridan of Arlington Circuit Court made this statement when he sentenced sixteen year-old Christopher Sharikas to life plus thirty years for an offense with a recommended sentence of seven to eleven years in 1998. Now nearly twenty years later, Christopher Sharikas is still in prison. If he did not have schizophrenia, he would certainly have been released years ago.

According to transcripts of the hearing, Judge Sheridan appears to have handed out his unusually harsh sentence in anger over the demeanor of the floridly psychotic teen at sentencing. The fact that Sharikas was delusional and untreated at the time was ignored, with the focus falling only on the fact that he seemed unrepentant to Sheridan and smirked during the sentencing hearing.

Judge Sheridan’s statement reveals a stunning truth; that the life sentence was based on his belief that the defendant should be locked up for the rest of his life because there was no guarantee he could be cured, treated, or made safe. Sharikas’s paranoid schizophrenia, a biological illness that he did not choose, caused the judge to make the sentence longer than the prosecution asked for, longer than the guidelines called for – as long as it could literally be. Life. Plus thirty years.

When we talk about the criminalization of mental illness, the sad story of Christopher Sharikas is a stark example of what we mean. A juvenile with paranoid schizophrenia, acting upon delusional thoughts, commits a crime. The courts do not recognize the mental illness as the reason for his conduct. He receives a harsher sentence than he would have otherwise received due to his diagnosis.

Judge Sheridan’s statement, that “it’s a gamble to say that a child (…) could be cured, treated, made safe,” reveals a prejudicial assumption that Christopher was inherently dangerous because of his illness and that treatment could not make him safe.

It suggests that the justice system has been harsher with those who commit crimes because of untreated mental illness than with offenders who commit crimes for traditional reasons like greed or revenge.

“A totally different person.”

Christopher Sharikas had a relatively normal suburban upbringing. He was the middle child of three who grew up in Fauquier County, Virginia. According to his mother, he was a typical sociable teen.

At fifteen, though, he changed. He became paranoid, acted out and became isolated. He began to use drugs, and carried a baseball bat. In the words of his brother Kevin, Christopher became “a totally different person.”

Though Christopher’s father initially resisted sending him to treatment, eventual hospitalization resulted in a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. Christopher’s parents struggled to get help for him but they could not make him take his pills. His condition predictably deteriorated.

A window of opportunity for treatment existed between the time when Christopher was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and when he committed the crime that would send him to prison for life. Though he was admitted for inpatient treatment and given medication, he stopped taking it after he was discharged. At some point following his refusal of medication, Sharikas evidently became dangerous to others – yet no intervention occurred.

He was twice convicted in juvenile court for carrying a blade, but neither incident led to compulsory treatment despite the clear red flag that the incidents, combined with his diagnosis, should have raised.

The crime

In April of 1997, the window for intervention through treatment closed. Based on auditory command hallucinations, Sharikas delusionally believed that he needed to get to Manhattan immediately. He attempted to rob a woman at knifepoint in Fairfax. The following day, a sheriff’s deputy questioned him but did not make an arrest. Later that afternoon, Sharikas approached a woman in Falls Church and demanded her car keys. Taking them, he then stabbed her in the back before fleeing in her vehicle. Though she eventually recovered, the victim spent weeks in the hospital healing from a punctured liver.

Sharikas could hardly have picked a target more likely to personally anger law enforcement or the Arlington courts. Amy Greenwood, the woman Sharikas attacked, was an intern in the Arlington prosecutor’s office and was dating a detective in the sheriff’s office.

Sharikas was arrested in Frederick, Maryland later that night when he crashed the car he stole from Greenwood. The bloody knife was found inside the vehicle. He was determined to be “extremely psychotic” and sent to the state hospital for competency restoration. Competency, in the legal sense, requires a defendant to be able to consult with his attorney with a reasonable degree of rational understanding of the proceedings against him and to have the capacity to assist in preparing his defense.

Since Christopher Sharikas was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 1996, some things have changed. In response to the Virginia Tech tragedy, civil commitment laws were strengthened. Funding was significantly increased – but only briefly. Yet Virginia continues to struggle to get treatment to very sick individuals. When it fails, they often end up in prison. We must strive to make it possible to get treatment for someone like Christopher Sharikas before his illness leads him into the criminal justice system. The tragedy of Senator Creigh Deeds and his son Gus in 2013 and the terrible, lonely death of Jamycheal Mitchell in 2015 show us that we still have a long way to go. We can’t give up.

Coming Thursday, an analysis of the safeguards in place for people with serious mental illness in the criminal justice system and how they failed in the case of Christopher Sharikas.