California's IST placement waitlist, from the public record
A California state-court mandate (not a federal decree) sets a 28-day placement standard for people found Incompetent to Stand Trial (IST). This page tracks what's publicly reported — irregularly, not on a monthly cadence.
Built and maintained by Sudhanshu Rai, an
independent researcher; not affiliated with any court, agency, or party. Descriptive measurement
only — no causal claims.
Governing order: a STATE court mandate, not a federal consent decree. Unlike Washington, Oregon, or Colorado, California's binding standard comes from Stiavetti v. Clendenin, a California state-court case, with a final 28-day admission standard that took effect March 2025. This distinction matters and has reportedly been gotten wrong in other coverage — there is no federal injunction governing California's IST placement timelines.
Get the data
Download the dataset behind this page
Every chart above is a view on this data, not the
other way around.
4 from annual fiscal-year budget tables, 17 from irregular budget-prose mentions — not a regular monthly series like Washington's or Oregon's. Treat gaps between points as genuinely unmeasured periods, not zero-change periods.
Irregular cadence — not comparable to other states' freshness
IST pending placement over time
2019-06–2025-08, 21 readings total. Point spacing is
genuinely uneven — see the KPI note above for why.
Status
Data quality and reporting limitations
California's public reporting on this metric is genuinely less frequent and less regular than Washington's or Oregon's — readings come from annual budget documents (a fiscal-year-end snapshot) and occasional mentions in budget narrative prose, not a dedicated monthly monitor report. The chart below should be read as sparse, irregularly-spaced snapshots, not a smooth monthly trend; large gaps between points reflect a genuine absence of published data for that window, not a flat/unchanged period. One further disclosed gap: the two newest budget PDFs already in this pipeline's source set each name a still-more-recent reading (275, then 256) in sentences dated only to a budget cycle ("as of 2026-27 Governor's Budget" / "...May Revision") rather than a specific calendar month — this pipeline doesn't infer a month from that label, so the KPI above is the most recent reading with a resolvable date, not necessarily the most recent number DSH has published.
Get the data
Download the dataset behind this page
Every chart above is a view on this data, not the
other way around.
Competency Restoration Observatory (2026). California IST pending-placement series [dataset].
competencyrestoration.org · data current through 2025-08 · page generated August 2026
· concept DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21436450 (always resolves to the latest dataset version — a
version-pinned DOI matching this exact data window follows at the next Zenodo release).
Every figure regenerates from the public source reports by code — fully reproducible.
The Zenodo deposit already includes real, MIT-licensed extraction code for the frozen
Washington/Oregon study (an extraction pipeline plus its own verification gate) — but this
dashboard's own full 5-state codebase (adapted from that study's code, plus Colorado, Texas, and
California from scratch) is a separate, not-yet-public repository. A dedicated "Build &
Replicate" walkthrough page and that public release are both planned but not yet published.
Researchers, clinicians, monitors, and reporters welcome —
especially if you know of more recent source reports for this state. Every correction to an
already-published number is logged on the Changelog page and in
this RSS feed — nothing changes silently.