Competency Restoration Observatory

Restoration wait times, month by month

An independent, reproducible measure of how long people wait for court-ordered competency restoration — rebuilt from each state's public court-monitor reports, with every number traceable to its source. Washington is the first fully built series.

Built and maintained by an independent researcher; not affiliated with any court, agency, plaintiff, or advocacy organization. An independent reproduction from public reports — official figures remain the court monitor's.

Washington's Trueblood injunction requires the state to provide court-ordered competency evaluation or restoration within 7 days of the order (in-jail evaluation carries a longer 14-day clock). This tool tracks that timeliness month by month, rebuilt from the public monitor reports — descriptive and association-only; not affiliated with the court, DSHS, or the monitor.
Source WA DSHS Trueblood monthly monitor reports (public) Span Feb 2018 – May 2026 · 100 months · as of the Jun 2026 monitor report Measure statewide inpatient restoration, order → admission (calendar days) v1 · July 2026
The record · monthly, 2018–2026

Statewide restoration timeliness

Caseload context · monthly, 2018–2026

Supply & demand

Court orders signed each month (new demand entering the queue) against orders completed (throughput) — a check on whether the timeliness gain reflects a real improvement or simply a lighter caseload.

Decomposition · by facility, monthly

By facility

Compliance with the 7-day admission standard at each restoration facility — the strictest of the monitor's three timeliness definitions (from order signature). The improvement appears across all three inpatient settings. Read RTF with care: it runs on very small monthly counts (n ≈ 6–15), so its line swings more than the volume warrants. OCRP (outpatient restoration) is in the dataset but omitted from this view.

Enforcement · Trueblood contempt

The enforcement context

The improvement coincided with the sustained-enforcement era of Trueblood.

$100Mcontempt sanction paid
Years of contempt findings under Trueblood led to a $100 million civil-contempt sanction, paid in 2023. These sanctions were coercive and remedial rather than punitive: paid into a court-supervised fund, from which subsequent orders directed money to court-approved diversion programs.

Shown because the timeliness gains occurred during the sustained-enforcement phase — not because causation is claimed. The sanctions are part of the public Trueblood docket. Association only; the tool does not attribute cause.

Cross-state view — in progress

The same pipeline harmonizes other states' monitor data onto one comparable panel. Washington is the dense, fully-built series; additional jurisdictions are being added next.

WA · built OR · built CO TX CA
Use the data

Cite, download, or get in touch

Cite this dataset

Competency Restoration Observatory (2026). Trueblood restoration-timeliness series (Washington), 2018–2026 [dataset]. competencyrestoration.org · DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21436450 (Zenodo).

Every figure regenerates from the public source reports by code — fully reproducible.

Data, code & contact

Open dataset (Zenodo) Code (GitHub)

Researchers, clinicians, monitors, and reporters welcome — get in touch.