I’ll have a full story in Sunday’s Spokesman-Review on today’s announcement of a landmark settlement in the long-running Jeff D. lawsuit over children’s mental health services in Idaho. In the meantime, check out this 2002 story by S-R reporter Jonathan Martin that profiled Jeff D., who was a youngster locked up in a state mental hospital in 1979 when two young lawyers found him - housed with adult sex offenders and held with no treatment and no schooling. The teen, then 17, had lived a troubled life that included seeing abusive foster parents beat his 4-year-old sister to death when he was just 2 years old; he grew up to be a transient who was in and out of mental hospitals.

“You intervene earlier, and you can expect a better result,” said Howard Belodoff, the Boise lawyer who has doggedly pursued the case for the past 35 years. “You don’t want any more Jeff D.’s.”