D.C. man has served 40 years in a mental hospital for stealing a $20 necklace

D.C. man has served 40 years in a mental hospital for stealing a $20 necklace
(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Franklin Frye is a 68-year-old Washington, D.C. man who has spent the entirety of his adult life confined unwillingly to a mental hospital. He was committed because he was accused of stealing a necklace worth $20 in 1970 and was deemed unfit to stand trial. Though the necklace in question was never found, and Frye has repeatedly appealed for release, he has struggled for years to hold the attention of the District's legal system.

While long-term institutionalization of the mentally ill in psychiatric facilities — or "lunatic asylums," as they used to be called — is generally considered the property of history books and horror flicks, it remains a very real legal limbo for people like Frye.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us
Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.