Like an echo of Tom Cruise’s latest movie, is there a minority report on Bruce Rowan?
Clallam County Prosecuting Attorney Chris Shea believes there are differing, minority opinions among Western State Hospital staff members when it comes to the possible “conditional release” of Rowan, a former emergency room doctor at Olympic Memorial Hospital.
Shea, who opposes Rowan’s release to lesser confinement at Western State, intends to try to draw out those opinions when hospital staff testifies at a court hearing in Port Angeles on Monday.
Superior Court Judge George Wood will decide after the hearing if Rowan has responded to treatment and is ready for release to an unlocked dormitory on the hospital grounds in preparation for living on his own outside the hospital.
Rowan has been inside the hospital’s locked ward for the criminally insane since Nov. 4, 1998, after a Clallam County jury found him innocent by reason of insanity for killing his wife, Deborah.
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