This morning NPR reported on unemployment among this nation's returning Veterans. At 13%, it is much higher than for the rest of the population. One Veteran of the Middle East recounted how employers would tell him straight out why they would not hire him. They were afraid that he would get angry and start shooting people.
It’s bad enough that the rest of us who have faced trauma and mental illness are treated this way, but to do it to those whom we have asked to sacrifice the most in our defense is utterly reprehensible and disgusting. We ask them to take up arms in our defense and risk life and limb, and then treat them like lepers because of their experiences in doing the very things we asked of them?
The legislatures that pass mental health laws that treat people with mental illness like Southern plantation Darkies should be ashamed of themselves. The Courts, all the way up to the Supreme Court of the United States, which have handed down Dred-Scott-like rulings and opinions that justify those legislatures should be ashamed of themselves. The local courts, which ignore even those bigoted laws and higher court rulings, and deprive citizens with mental illness of due process should be ashamed of themselves. The local officials and police who treat people with mental illness to a lower standard of evidence and service, even in investigations of complaints, should be ashamed of themselves. Not to mention employers who indulge in and pander to common bigotry.
Even the EEOC, that purported bastion of civil rights and equal treatment, created a situation in its Enforcement Guidance on employment and psychiatric disabilities that amounted to political sabotage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. One of its examples required employers to put up with any surly and almost unwashed employee who couldn’t be trusted to behave around customers and co-workers. Both that and the Post Office shootings, occurring coincidentally about the same time, launched a tremendous backlash against the ADA. Aided and abetted by news media opinions equating the ADA to something requiring employers to hire ax murderers. Followed by a host of opportunistic employment “risk assessment” consultants that identified anyone with a mental illness as a potential threat of violence, using criteria without any medical or scientific validity. (Backlash Against the ADA, Ed by Linda Hamilton Krieger, University of Mich. Press, 2003; Sharing the Dream: Is the ADA Accommodating All?, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1998)
It has gotten so bad that no one with a mental illness can be allowed to have normal human emotions. Getting angry and raising one’s voice in outrage, as might anyone else in a similar situation, risks forcible drugging and incarceration by local and state authorities to “get control”, on the mere basis of any threat imagined to be “reasonable”. I hear that’s a cultural and humanitarian advance from lynching and burning at the stake.
And now our society is taking its fear and loathing out on Veterans who have fought for us overseas? My other comments on the matter cannot be printed in a family publication.
There’s one section of the Oklahoma Mental Health Code that reads like it came out of a KKK manual. It’s 43A-1-103.18.c, part of the definition of “Risk of harm to self others”. It reads, “having placed another person or persons in a reasonable fear of violent behavior directed towards such person or persons or serious physical harm to them as manifested by serious and immediate threats”. It couples with the definition of a “Person requiring treatment” in 43A-1-103.13.a.(1), “a person who because of a mental illness of the person represents a risk of harm to self or others”, to justify involuntary commitment in a mental institution.
“Reasonable fear” explains what happened to Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955 [http://www.emmetttillmurder.com/Emerge%201995.htm]. So many White Southerners back then had a “reasonable fear” about black men, even children, threatening white women, with even so little as a whistle used to correct a stutter. That’s how the Willie Horton ad helped George H.W. Bush win the 1988 Presidential election against Michael Dukakis. It induced some white people to have a “reasonable fear” that Dukakis would let black murderers out of jail to rape their white women. Any bigot can have a “reasonable fear”. The Oklahoma Mental Health Code directs it against people with mental illness.
The 1988 Random House Revised Edition College Dictionary defines bigot as “a person who is utterly intolerant of any creed, belief, or race that is not his own”. It defines chauvinism as “prejudiced devotion to any attitude or cause”. It defines prejudice as “an unfavorable opinion or feeling formed beforehand or without knowledge, thought or reason”. Which is all pretty much the same thing. A nice woman I know has or had a racist grandmother who would shout racial epithets out against any passing black person. To justify it, she said in so many words, “They don’t look like us. They don’t walk or talk like us. They don’t smell like us. They don’t think like us. They’re just different.”
Remember, “They don’t think like us”, “They’re just different”. And “reasonable people” feel threatened. Try this. Instead of saying a person with “a mental illness”, stick in “a woman who was asking for it with her short dress”, or “a young black male with a strutting walk”, or “a Native American holding a brown paper bag the size and shape of a bottle of Thunderbird”. Now imagine _that_ has been written into law. Nasty, isn’t it?
So it’s not unreasonable to think that the intellectual and philosophical inheritors of those white people who participated in the Tulsa race riots became legislators and found other people they can still treat with legitimized fear, loathing and contempt. Much safer targets, much less able and organized to fight back against bigotry. Imagine how much white Christian courage it took to pass that kind of law. Which, incidentally, the Attorney General of Oklahoma is proud to defend. Even when an Oklahoma Department and a Mental Health Court dispense with the protections of due process provided by a bigoted law, ignoring a great many “shall” clauses, and taking shortcuts of self-interest and convenience.
Still feel threatened? Try reading “The Clinical Prediction of Violent Behavior”, by John Monahan, circa 1980 (1995 softcover edition), Jason Aronson Inc., Northvale, NJ, London, 134 p. Then imagine a new form of breast or prostate/testicular cancer, for which the only treatment to avoid death is total removal of the breast or prostate and testicles. And the accuracy of the test for it equals that of the clinical prediction of violence – approximately 1/3 true positives, the rest false. Try that deal on for size. Especially if you are an Attorney General, Mental Health Court Judge, District Attorney, State psychiatrist, or legislator.
There’s a foul odor coming from the Office of the District Attorney and the Court of Mental Health in the City and County of Tulsa. The kind of odor that says, when it comes to dealing with people with mental illness, it is permissible to give false testimony and manufacture evidence. Let me give you a few examples, with some documentation, from my stay at the local loony bin, a.k.a. the Tulsa Center for Behavioral Health (TCBH).
Among the Court papers I was given, Mental Health Court Judge Theresa Dreiling signed and filed on August 6, 2010 an “Order Setting Hearing and Directing Pre-Hearing Detention; and Order Releasing Confidential Records”. It’s a fill-in-the-blanks form, in which the printed fourth paragraph states, “WHEREAS, is appears further that the information sought is not available elsewhere and can only be obtained from the detaining and/or treating facility or the Department of Mental Health and Substance Services;”. Well now, that’s a falsehood, and evidently one written into usual Court procedure to give TCBH the monopoly on how the defendant’s mental state is represented to the Court. Pretty handy if the Judge intends to rubber-stamp TCBH decisions. It’s a falsehood because I told the TCBH people who interviewed me and the Court that I had been going to psychiatrists at the O.U. Psychiatric Clinic to manage my medications for depression and PTSD for the previous six or seven years. In fact, I still have appointment reminder cards going back to 2006. Who lied? TCBH, the Judge, or both?
As I may have noted before, all the “witnesses” who signed or were identified in sworn statements (in my possession), as to my need for incarceration in a mental facility, came either from the mental facility itself, or the organization that feeds it candidates for commitment, the Community Outreach Psychiatric Emergency Services (COPES). The are: Kevin Bethune, MALPC, of COPES, Aug 3, 2010; Ivan (or Juan) Lopes of TCBH (illegible title letters), Aug 3, 2010; Julie King, MS, LPC, Aug 5, 2010; and Dr. Lori C. Miller, MD, Aug 5, 2010. Perhaps more on their “testimony” another time. None of them appeared at the commitment hearing in my presence. Nor were they required to testify or be cross-examined, even though parts 5-411.5.b and 5-419.7 state that I “shall” have the right to cross-examine witnesses. Further, part 5-411.5.b states, “The petitioner and witnesses identified in the petition shall offer testimony under oath at the hearing on the petition.” And part 5-419.7 states that one “shall” be notified of “the right to call witnesses in such person’s own defense.” Not only did none of those things happen, Judge Dreiling did not even allow me to state my side of the case regarding the original allegations against me.
This occurred in secret session, with the smell of a kangaroo court. The Justices of the Oklahoma Supreme Court supervise the operations of the individual District Courts. Yet if one complains to a Justice about this kind of situation, the Justice does not deign to reply. Apparently the Supreme Court does not dedicate itself to extending the protections of due process to a minority that is often feared and loathed in common media representations and bigotry.
On September 9, 2010, Judge Dreiling held a hearing in Mental Health Court to review my commitment, attended by myself, Teri R. Terrell, Assistant Public Defender, Michelle Keely, Assistant District Attorney, and James Pfeffer, Assistant District Attorney, as well as others I seem to recall from TCBH and/or the Mental Health Court. ADA Keely took the lead in “defending” TCBH in order to keep me imprisoned. As I recall, when I complained about the alleged evidence against me, she claimed that she only needed “a preponderance of the evidence”. Neither Judge Dreiling nor my Public Defender objected to that false statement, and I didn’t know any better at the time.
Later I found that in the Addington v. Texas case of 1979 the U.S. Supreme Court, noting that civil commitment is “a significant deprivation of liberty”, set the standard at “clear and convincing evidence”, intermediate between “a preponderance of the evidence” and “beyond a reasonable doubt”. The Supreme Court did so because it did not think that states could prove anything “beyond a reasonable doubt” with psychiatry. I can believe that. Apparently it did not then nor has since considered the terrible inaccuracies of the psychiatric clinical predictions of violent behavior. The Oklahoma Mental Health Code cites eight times that the standard “clear and convincing evidence” shall be used. That would exclude damning “testimony” given by Mr. Bethune of COPES, which amounted to no more than unsworn hearsay, which was never fully investigated by the Tulsa Police Department, nor subjected to cross-examination in a court of law. Yet, though the Supreme Court standard has been in place for over 30 years, the Tulsa District Attorney’s Office is willing to lower its arguments to the level of a common grifter when dealing in secret with people having mental illness.
The Attorney General of Oklahoma has defended these ethical lapses in Federal District Court in case 11-CV-92-TCK-PJC, demanding that the case should be dismissed on the contention that state employees have absolute immunity from lawsuit for the “good-faith performance of their duties”. Yet, the U.S. Supreme Court held in United States v. Classic (1941) and Monroe v. Pape (1961) that there is no absolute immunity or total exemption for government officials as a class. They only have qualified immunity _within_ the good faith performance of their duties.
In Wood v. Strickland (1975) the Supreme Court states that a school official “must be held to a standard of conduct based not only on permissible intentions, but also on knowledge of the basic, unquestioned constitutional rights of his charges. Such a standard imposes neither an unfair burden upon a person assuming a responsible public office requiring a high degree of intelligence and judgment for the proper fulfillment of its duties, nor an unwarranted burden in light of the value which civil rights have in our legal system.” And “we hold that a school board member is not immune from liability for damages under § 1983 if he knew or reasonably should have known that the action he took within his sphere of official responsibility would violate the constitutional rights of the student affected, or if he took the action with the malicious intention to cause a deprivation of constitutional rights or other injury to the student.”
A U.S. Court of Appeals states in Rogers v. Okin (1984) that “the substantive rights created by legitimate, objective expectations derived from state law are entitled to the procedural protections of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” Regarding due process in Foucha v. Louisiana, 504 U.S. 71 (1992), the Supreme Court stated, “the substantive component of the Due Process Clause bars certain arbitrary wrongful government actions regardless of the fairness of the procedures used to implement them (Zinnerman v. Burch, 494 U.S. 113, 126) … but proof by a preponderance of the evidence fell short of satisfying due process.”
One might think that a Mental Health Court Judge in an Oklahoma District Court would and should know and strictly observe the Oklahoma Mental Health Code, the case law of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Constitution of the United States. Depriving a defendant of due process protections, even from an arguably bigoted law, on the basis of a psychiatric disability, does not meet these standards. It does not pass the smell test.
On February 1, 2012, Judge Terrence C. Kern, United State District Judge in the Northeastern District of Oklahoma, dismissed my case, 11-CV-92-TCK-PJC, with prejudice. In justification, he alluded not to a single one of the legal points I raised, but to my numerous deficiencies in legal style. That could apply to anyone who has no legal training, an unpopular cause, and cannot find or afford a lawyer. In other words, it seems access to justice depends almost solely upon presentation, not substance.
This is what many of us hate about our legal system. The appearance of justice rather than its substance. The lack of access for those who cannot afford a lawyer. The dismissal of complaints based upon the inability of an untutored plaintiff to know the law completely upon entry into this system. There is often a time limit on complaints, and in order to enter a complaint without a lawyer, one has to do so before knowing how to make the complaint, or even the applicable laws. It is a learning process with which some Judges have no patience. If one can’t say it in the legal shorthand that a Judge finds preferable and efficient, one isn’t welcome in his Court. Or one might say Club.
Nor does this Judge have any patience with health problems. My progress and learning on this case have been hampered with chronic and acute conditions. Based upon this dismissal, he doesn’t want to hear about them at all. Painful back problems. Medications with disabling side effects. Food poisoning. Respiratory infections. Two trips to the Emergency Room and hospital stays last year with kidney and urinary tract infections, one on the morning of December 25th. Not to mention the depression and PTSD that the local loony bin used to justify its violations of my civil liberties. Justice, even the appearance of justice, it seems, is reserved for the healthy.
I’m thoroughly sick of this and tired. But I don’t see anyone else in this town speaking up about the egregious violations of due process foisted upon those of us with mental illnesses, just because we have mental illnesses. The alleged protectors of us poor people who don’t know what’s good for us have only convinced me that if there is ever a next time, it would be better not to be taken alive. And if taken alive, not to remain alive. Because it’s not about helping people overcome mental illness. It’s about making unpopular people “behave”. Rather like a communist re-education camp.
Maybe some people think that live is so infinitely precious that it is better to toe the line and endure that kind of repression. But it takes the bloom off the rose for me. It gives me a much greater appreciation for New Hampshire’s State Motto, uttered by Revolutionary War General John Stark on July 31, 1809. “Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils.” So until that happens, I hope to keep making this case, in whatever venue will hear it.
Do you have a problem with Authority? They says Now which authority would that be, says I? The one that’s learned, earned and respected Or the one that’s mean, petty, and vindictive And likes itself too well?
At the end of “Good Night and Good Luck”, a George Clooney film about the battle between CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow and U.S. Senator McCarthy, when McCarthy is going down, Dwight David Eisenhower appears in a TV clip to say what he thinks about it. He says:
“Why are we proud? We are proud first of all because from the beginning of this Nation - a man can walk upright. No matter who he is. Or who she is. He can walk upright and meet his friends, or his enemies. And he does not fear, because that enemy may be a position in great power. That he can be suddenly thrown in jail. To rot there without charges and no recourse to justice. We have the Habeus Corpus Act and we respect it.”
In the State of Oklahoma, that is not true for those of us with mental illness, and perhaps others. Summary arrest and detention can be accomplished merely on the false allegations of an accuser - without charges or investigation, without access to evidence, without examination of one’s accusers or a trial by jury, without access even to one’s own Doctors or Psychiatrists of long standing. Once guilt of wrong thinking has been decided by the Police and Community Outreach Psychiatric Emergency Services, one can be picked up and taken straight to the local loony bin. Where guilt is presumed merely because one is there. “If you didn’t do anything, then why are you here?” they say. After those same psychiatrists and counselors at that facility have ginned up the worst possible mental health evaluation to justify the false charges and involuntary commitment.
When a Federal Court refuses to hear such a case, with prejudice, without even considering the legal arguments advanced, it puts the lie to President Eisenhower’s statement at an even higher level.
If my experience is any guide, the Tulsa Public Defender’s Office, from the very first meeting with a client, inexcusably fails in its moral, legal, professional and ethical obligations to adequately defend people with mental illnesses. In the first meeting before appearing in Mental Health Court, the Oklahoma Mental Health Code requires the defendant’s attorney to present to the client “a statement of the person’s rights, including all rights afforded to the person by the Oklahoma and United States Constitutions.” I never saw one. Even though a client can be permanently stripped of civil rights in the current practice of Mental Health Court, the Public Defender’s office does not bother to explain the practical legal consequences of such things as not getting a trial by jury and commitment to a mental facility. One might think there is a tacit agreement among those “professionals” concerned that they should not waste too much time or resources on defending or assuring the rights of people with mental illnesses.
Here is a partial list of the things to which the Public Defender’s Office does not bother to object in Mental Health Court: the prejudiced failure of the Tulsa Police to investigate a complaint fully and impartially, or to take statements from witnesses other than the defendant’s accusers; the lack of sworn statements or complaints from anyone outside of the mental health system; the use of hearsay evidence as proven fact; the unconstitutional lowering of the standard of evidence from “clear and convincing” to “a preponderance”; the failure of the Mental Health Court Judge to appoint a mental health examining commission that is independent of the facility that will benefit by the commitment; the false assertion that the only mental health information available comes from the mental health facility that will benefit from the commitment; the dependence of the Mental Health Court Judge solely upon the mental health evaluations of the facility that will benefit from the commitment; the artificial exaggeration of those evaluations by the facility to achieve a commitment; the conflict of interest in allowing the facility psychiatrist who will treat the defendant serve as a “witness”, an “evaluator” and the petitioner for commitment; the limitation of sworn “witnesses” solely to employees of the mental health facility and those who provide it with candidates for commitment; a situation in which delivery to the facility causes the defendant extreme stress and upset, which cannot be separated from any condition prior to arrest, and is then used to justify commitment; the proven propensity of innocent people to falsely incriminate themselves in such situations; the fact proven by long-standing medical and legal research that the mental health facility cannot accurately predict the defendant’s alleged “dangerousness” better than about one time out of three, leaving the other two falsely incarcerated; the refusal of the mental health facility or Mental Health Court Judge to obtain long-standing outside medical and psychiatric information and treatment records in consideration of the least intrusive alternative treatment; and the refusal of the facility to release an inmate, including one who objects to commitment based on hearsay, on the basis that the inmate cannot prove the negative, that he or she is not a “danger” to anyone – in other words, incarceration based upon uncertainty rather than provable fact.
These are not tough concepts of injustice for the layman to grasp, much less honest, conscientious and experienced lawyers. One need only ask if this is the standard of evidence and justice one would want for one’s self. Unfortunately, outside of some public scandal, the public defenders, the mental facility “professionals” and the Mental Health Court Judge, have little if any incentive to reform. People with mental illnesses are unpopular, demonized in entertainment and the press. The penalties in State law for anything short of beating and raping a mental health inmate are almost non-existent. And even though Federal law and the Constitution have protections against such treatment, it seems the local Federal Court and Justice Department will not support due process for someone with a mental illness. Small wonder that few people with serious difficulties will “get help” voluntarily. Too often, it’s just a license for more of the kind of abuse that caused or aggravated the original condition.
Republican candidates speak as if waging class warfare is something that Democrats have recently introduced. As if the virtual exclusion of those who can’t afford lawyers from standing up for their rights in court isn’t. As if nullifying equal employment opportunity and accommodation for disabilities on the justification of “business necessity” isn’t. Having won those class battles, business-minded Republicans now pretend that class warfare is something new, evil and underhanded.
I can think of several examples in the courts. One lawyer for the local legal aide related attending a conference where eviction was a topic. She claimed to have asked one local judge if there is ever any defense against eviction. He reportedly said no. So any negligent, ruthless, abusive landlord, who habitually lies to a captive population of seniors, can provoke a statement from a stressed senior, manipulate it out of context, and add fabrications to justify an eviction. Even if the senior makes it to the local court, the court guarantees that the landlord cannot lose.
If you have a disability and wish to be sickened, read the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the 2002 Toyota v. Williams case. Using lengthy and tortured reasoning, the High Court allowed Toyota to dispose of any employee who could fill any position but one, due to disability. Toyota merely had to institute a system of job rotation through all the positions and claim that it was “business necessity”. A plausible but transparent ploy that the rest of us can see, and the Supreme Court took great pains to justify. The monocultural Japanese are famous for their intolerance of human difference. As they say, “The nail that stands up will be hammered down.” Just ask those maimed and shamed by mercury poisoning at Minamata.
Then read the 2001 Huffman v. OPM decision of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on the Whistleblower Protecton Act (WPA). Courts often complain about laws that add to their dockets. This court feared that “virtually every employee who was disciplined could claim protection of the Act.” So it gutted the WPA with tortured reasoning on the definition of the word “disclose”. It held that since a supervisor involved in wrongdoing already knew about it, the subordinate who alerted the supervisor to it could not be protected from retaliation under the WPA. That’s like saying that an innocent employee in a crime mob’s allegedly legitimate business, who alerted his or her supervisor to something he or she witnessed, could not be protected from torture and murder. In order to keep its case load down, and save itself the trouble of making necessary distinctions, the Federal Circuit artificially pinned the protection of the WPA not on the non-trivial consequences of the wrongdoing and retaliation, but upon the mere circumstances of the disclosure.
It seems from these examples that judges and lawyers too often relate to the rest of us, especially those without the means to afford them, the same way that Mitt Romney is currently unemployed. Or, changing a word in a line of Shakespeare, “He jests at scars who never felt a wound.” (Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, scene 2)
If you have anyone you care about in a State of Oklahoma approved or run mental health facility, I strongly suggest that you make sure they get seen on a regular basis by a doctor and a psychiatrist that are outside and independent of the State mental health system. Because, by my experience, that person’s true needs might very well not be met within it. That person’s health could even be at risk by reason of being there.
I’ve been a military dependent and on the move all my life until 2003, when I moved to Tulsa. I’ve seen good, bad and indifferent doctors and nurses. In the local loony bin, state psychiatrists perform the duties of both psychiatrist and physician, and may be fit for neither. Furthermore, after functioning as “witnesses”, mental health “evaluators”, and petitioners for commitment, these doctors and counselors, who benefit from the commitments, balk at even obtaining outside information from an patient’s doctors and psychiatrists of long standing. They absolutely refuse outside professionals the right to “practice” within their facility. Which other State psychiatrists honor, like those at the O.U. Psychiatric Clinic. Along with the Mental Health Court Judge, they certify, in a printed form, that the only medical information apparently available for use in commitment hearings comes from them. Very handy for keeping their personal and professional inadequacies safe from discovery, and filling the beds that presumably justify their salaries.
First, the Tulsa Center for “Behavioral Health” (TCBH) didn’t bother to take or obtain my full and complete medical history. I was 64 at the time with chronic conditions, and had to press even to get my previously prescribed medications considered. I didn’t even get all of them, like blood pressure and prostate medication. When I was having trouble with my blood pressure, I was told that my alleged doctor and psychiatrist, Dr. Lori Miller, had written an order refusing me medication unless my BP went above 150/100, when it was supposed to be kept at 100/70. High blood pressure tends to make me very irritable, not the best state of mind for someone allegedly being treated in a mental facility. It was common practice for the techs to ask me to raise my hand with the BP wrist cuff at or even above my heart if the first reading came out too high.
Later on, when I had a moderate asthma attack, I found that Dr. Miller had ordered my rescue inhaler be provided to me only at set medication times. As if asthma conforms to a schedule. In years past, before the advent of commonly available inhalers, I have had the gorilla sit on my chest in the night. But still the nurses on duty at the time would not “bother” the Doctor for an order to allow me access to the inhaler, and could not understand why I was so upset. When I finally got an order for access on the request of the patient, from Dr. Sarah Land I think, she did it not for the rescue inhaler, but the maintenance inhaler, which is normally used on a schedule. When I started having problems pissing, I got no medical help at all. Apparently having letters after one’s name does not assure medical diligence or competence.
There were other patients with other poorly treated problems. I saw one new patient convulsing on the floor, who was discounted as “seeking attention”. One young woman, who kept asking for a painkiller, Tramadol, showed me a four inch surgery scar in her abdomen. By the time she left, she was still skinny as a rail, and had a belly swelling too rapidly to be a pregnancy. It could have been anything from constipation to cancer.
One of my roommates had sleep apnea so bad that his breath repeatedly dropped to nothing, followed about a minute later by a gasp and extremely loud snoring. I was worried about him and raised a fuss, asking for a nurse to check on him. A tech told me in no uncertain terms that I was out of line and that my roommate had no problem beyond snoring. Although they could hear him down the hall, the nurse(s) refused to come.
The only person I ever heard of who got sent to a hospital, an old man with severe shaking due to medication, didn’t get sent until he started choking on his food. Only a schizophrenic woman, who suffered from hearing voices that encouraged her to severe self-mutilation, got continuous monitoring and physical care. These are just the ones I know about.
The psychiatrists only saw us about 30 minutes to an hour at most every week or two. At one meeting, Dr. Miller was unaware that I have major depression and that she had signed the order for my medication. Yet these fly-by physicians claimed to know us better than ourselves. If, after being familiar with one’s condition, treatment, and mis-treatment for nearly 60 years, one disagrees with their opinions, they accuse a person of not being “self aware”, or taking responsibility for one’s own actions.
The Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services alleges these people to be “trauma informed” and to provide appropriate services (http://www.ok.gov/odmhsas/Mental_Health_/Specialized_Programs_and_Services/Trama_Informed_Services/). Yet the at least one Counselor, Ms. Julie King, provided a cookie-cutter response to those of us with social difficulties: “If you are having problems with all these people, then what is the common denominator? The common denominator is you.” She also claimed that the only consideration that mattered in treatment was how others “perceive” the person with the health problems. In other words, the person who had been maimed, assaulted or abused had a duty to fix him or her self and stop bothering others with it.
Those make great punch lines for conservative politicians, but they have no healing function in psychiatry or medicine. It’s like telling a woman who was raped to get over it and back into bed, to service her husband in the manner he deserves. Or a cancer doctor telling a woman that her mastectomy scars will just be like the staples in a Playboy centerfold. Good luck to any returning Veteran with PTSD and other difficulties who gets caught up in their personal politics.
Title 43A, the Oklahoma Mental Health Code, comes close to, if not actually reaching, an unconstitutional Bill of Attainder. When the Mental Health Court commonly ignores even the due process provisions of this bigoted law, there is no practical difference.
According to one source, http://www.legal-explanations.com/definitions/bill-of-attainder.htm, the definition of Bill of Attainder is: “(n) Bill Of Attainder is a legislative Act which declares a person or group as guilty of any crime, there by ordering punishment to them, without allowing them a chance to represent their cause or an unbiased trial to determine whether they are guilty. Many constitutions prohibit enacting of such Acts. This was practiced by English monarchies during eighteenth century.”
It is said that a criminal is convicted for only one of every ten criminal acts. Partly because the criminal most often goes undiscovered, and partly because in every trial, “It is better that ten guilty men go free than one innocent man be convicted.” This is the deal that gang-bangers, drug dealers, murderers and child molesters get. It doesn’t matter what people fear they might do, if they can’t prove criminals have actually done it. At least for the first time, in the case of child molesters. It doesn’t matter what a criminal might be thinking of doing in the future, because the criminal cannot be compelled to testify against himself.
Yet thirty years ago, medical and legal studies showed that the “experts” could predict the future likelihood of a person with mental illness committing violence only about one time in three; less than one time in two at best. A person with mental illness may be detained and examined on the mere hearsay or unsworn accusation of threat, even a false one. A person with mental illness can be examined by “experts” for fault without a trial, with the intent of inducing or coercing self-incrimination, without even a lawyer present. The local Mental Health Court currently accepts any recommendation the local “experts” give, without making sure that the accused person with mental illness has adequate and legally-mandated information on legal and constitutional rights, the opportunity to plead his or her case, or to call and examine witnesses. Even for the two times out of three that the “experts” are wrong, or have even artificially inflated mental health evaluations in aid of commitment, once the commitment has taken place, the accused is required to prove his or her thoughts are clean of all socially unacceptable taint. Otherwise the punishment and violation of civil liberties continues indefinitely, without any fixed term.
Why do violent criminals get so much better treatment in the law and courts than people with mental illnesses, who are merely accused of merely thinking of committing acts of violence? Who are merely accused of merely inducing a “reasonable fear” of threat in another person? Why are people with mental illnesses encouraged to incriminate themselves? Allegedly, it is for the benefit of people with mental illness and the safety of society. Yet if you ask those responsible to prove or demonstrate conclusively that, in spite of the vast majority of evidence to the contrary, people with mental illnesses actually benefit from this kind of vile, discriminatory treatment, or that society is actually safer, they can only fall back on the assertions that they know so because they have titles before and letters after their names.
And then there is the race issue. Most black people with such accusations against them get sent to jail. But you can’t examine black people without lawyers, and convict for their thoughts; there are civil rights laws against it. From what I’ve seen, the mental health facility inmates are predominately white. So one could say that the Oklahoma Mental Health Code is just a Bill of Jim Crow Attainder for white people. A way to exercise righteous bigotry on someone else, now that doing so to women and racial minorities is no longer legally or politically correct. The Supreme Court of Oklahoma, which is in charge of supervising the Mental Health Court in this mess, should be ashamed of itself for the extralegal violations of constitutional rights and civil liberties it has allowed to occur under the color of law.
Recently, a Tulsa Police official complained in public that the TPD was having trouble investigating the shooting of a man crossing a street in North Tulsa. He attributed it to a “don’t snitch” mentality, as if no one could possibly be telling the truth that it was night and they weren’t looking out at the time, or be wary of dealing with a Police Department they might think is a nest of bigots.
I have some personal experience with that. I know there are bigots in the TPD because I’ve met them and suffered from their bigotry. A few years back, after I complained to my apartment management that he wasn’t keeping his dog on a leash, a disabled man in a power chair chased me down on a public street just west of the apartments. He blocked me with his chair and made threatening references to what might happen if I didn’t stay out of his business. Having been threatened with death and assaulted more than once in my life, I call the TPD. When I tried to tell the responding Officer about how this bothered my PTSD, he immediately took the side of the cripple and threatened me with legal action. It took a letter to the TPD complaining about this discriminatory behavior to get a reasoned response. Sometime later, the cripple started accusing me to the apartment management of stalking and taking videos of him. I did no such thing. I’ve been an amateur photographer for decades, and often took pictures around the apartments and neighborhood. The guy was more that a little paranoid.
When I got into it with a new apartment manager, and got very upset over an impossible deadline to get my several thousand pounds of property out of my apartment, it seems the manager sicced COPES (the Community Outreach Psychiatric Emergency Services) and the TPD on me. Several people from COPES and two TPD Officers showed up to interview me. One Officer did all the talking. The other sat there with a superior looking smirk on his face, as is to say that he wouldn’t waste his time dealing with a nut case. Long after the TPD showed up to arrest me in front of my neighbors and friends, and cart me off to the local loony bin, I found out from neighbors, who could have testified that the manager and at least one of her employees were habitual liars, that the TPD had not bothered to interview any of them. At various times during the next 66 days after my arrest and detention, the loony bin “professionals”, the Mental Health Court and the District Attorney’s Office beat me over the head with false, unsworn allegations, as if they had been proven to be true.
My neighbors, whom the TPD did not interview, have refused my requests to voluntarily testify in my defense. I can’t blame them much for feeling that way. They watched what happened to me when I went up against the management with mere satire. They watched the TPD do it. They are poor and afraid of being evicted, too, if they say anything. They know that the TPD and District Attorney will look out for the business before its customers, and has absolutely no duty or interest in protecting them. They may even have some legitimate fear of being dismissed outright, as being out of touch with reality, as was I.
There are two cases of special interest to me: Arpin v. Santa Clara Valley Transportation Agency, 261 F.3d 912 (9th Cir. 2001), in which a PD was successfully sued for not pursuing an independent investigation; and Wilson v. Lawrence County, 260 F.3d 946 (8 Cir. 2001), where the court denied police qualified immunity because they failed to investigate other leads in a murder case. As the Court said in Wilson, “Law enforcement officers, like prosecutors, have a responsibility to criminal defendants to conduct their investigations and prosecutions fairly as illustrated by the Brady line of cases requiring the state to disclose exculpatory evidence to the defense.” The reviewer of the case at the IACP conference noted: “If Wilson’s evidence proves credible at trial, the failure to investigate could lead to a finding that their inaction was reckless or intentional, thus supporting a due process claim.”
Until the TPD and its Officers change their attitudes on how they protect (for which the courts have declared they have no legal duty) and serve (which they only do on their individual senses of responsibility), who’s going to trust and cooperate with them, but those whom they _prefer_ to serve and protect.
In one of the Startrek series episodes, the crew is having some R&R on a new planet. While shopping in an open air market, the former Maquis rebel gets jostled by a native of the planet. Being a disciplined member of a starship crew, and all-round decent person, she does not indulge in a sudden urge to punch the guy out. She then finds to her unpleasant surprise that the thoughts of everyone on the planet are monitored, and that is a crime punishable by death to have a violent impulse. I know how she felt and second that emotion.
Now, this kind of power over thought might seem like a Mental Heath Court’s or Department of Mental Health facility’s moist dream. But I can assure you from personal experience that they are not interested in imposing physical death. They are quite happy with crushing independent thought, and ruining a person’s life with a permanent official label of potential violence.
Why will Police not investigate, the District Attorney and “mental health professionals” not believe, or a Court not hear the witness and claims of someone with a mental illness? Because bigots are their own proof.
Betimes it came to pass that Morton Thiokol Managers did lawyereth and lobbyeth their Engineers mightily. This did they say unto their Engineers. If thou canst not prove that thy rings-of-O shall fail, thou must then giveth thy blessing to the Launch that it may proceed. Verily, the Engineers, not able to giveth such proof, did giveth instead their blessing. Even though it sateth not well among them. And lo, it did come to pass that their Space Shuttle did climbeth partway unto Heaven. And then did falleth all the way back down. And then some. Then did the Engineers beat their breasts and give up a great wailing unto the Heavens. For those lives they had lost without need. When their Space Shuttle did falleth from the sky. Deep into the bottomless Sea. For they had been Fools, lawyereth by Fools. Verily, Verily, I say unto thee. Thou canst and mayest and shall not lawyereth the Natural Law which was made by God. In the mere Appearance of that which seemeth Good to thee. For then thy Dams shall they fail, and thy Bridges and thy Buildings shall they fall. And those that dependeth upon thee shall they die. And thus, in the peril of thy Soul, thou wilt gnash thy teeth and cry great tears of sorrow unto the Heavens. For thou art and shalt be known a Fool.
Extract from the draft of an appeal to the Tenth Circuit
41. Considering that people with mental illnesses have long been treated with fear and loathing out of all rational proportion to their actual and minimal threat, even before the Salem witch trials, the Plaintiff intends to challenge the entire manner how people with mental illnesses have been treated within and without the law, legally and extra-legally. Despite over 30 years of medical and legal research to the contrary, our legal system has based its treatment of people with mental illnesses on the presumed basis of a higher level of “dangerousness”, pretending that this is not the same as a presumption of guilt, even though the consequences to and deprivations of civil liberties are much the same. Even though the rate of violence among people with mental illness is only slightly higher than the general population, limited mostly to those with a prior history of violence and substance abuse, and even though research has shown 30 years ago that clinical prediction of violent behavior is less accurate than one in two, more often like one in three, our legal system has allowed such “expert testimony” to destroy the civil liberties of any person with any mental illness, no matter the lack of any significant history of violence, both temporarily and permanently.
42. See “The Clinical Prediction of Violent Behavior”, John Monahan, circa 1979-1980, National Institute of Mental Health and Jason Aronson, Inc., 134 p (amazon.com). See “Psychiatric Disabilities, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the New Workplace Violence Account”, Vicki A. Laden and Gregory Schwartz, Berkeley Journal of Employment & Labor Law, Vol 21(246-270), circa 2000, available on the Internet. See The MacArthur Foundation Risk Assessment Study, circa 2001-2005, on the Internet. See Chapter 5, Psychiatric Disabilities and the ADA, of “Sharing the Dream: Is the ADA Accommodating All?”, a report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights which was product of a two-day hearing conducted by the Commission on November 12–13, 1998, was available at http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/ada/ch5.htm). See “Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit” by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker, circa 1996 (amazon.com).
If nothing else, these sources will demonstrate that the only consistently and truly violent people with mental illnesses are those that have already been violent, especially those who abuse drink and drugs.
43. For example, in ADDINGTON V. TEXAS, 441 U. S. 418 (1979) the High Court stated, “The reasonable doubt standard is inappropriate in civil commitment proceedings because, given the uncertainties of psychiatric diagnosis, it may impose a burden the state cannot meet, and thereby erect an unreasonable barrier to needed medical treatment. The state should not be required to employ a standard of proof that may completely undercut its efforts to further the legitimate interests of both the state and the patient that are served by civil commitments.” It did so without consideration of the 228 references, from 1922 to 1980, cited by Monahan in “The Clinical Prediction of Violent Behavior”. And without consideration Prof. Monahan’s finding of the terrible inaccuracy of such predictions, that would wrongly condemn as many as two out of every three persons found “guilty” of the likelihood of future violence due to mental illness, by the use of the standard of “clear and convincing evidence” in actual psychiatric practice. It may not be quite as bad as throwing an alleged and tied up witch into a pond to see if the water rejects her, but if this Court of Appeals cannot reconsider such matters at its level, it may at least pass them on to the Supreme Court.
44. There is also the matter of who actually needs and benefits from the “treatment”, the captive, involuntary patients, or the doctors and facilities who find it necessary for their continued profit and employment. The High Court has not adequately addressed the matter of how many and badly innocent people are damaged by these presumptions, processes and “treatments”. This, despite many cases and decades of scandal, abuse and outright abduction of vulnerable people for profit.
45. Even though some mental illnesses cannot often be reliably distinguished from traumatic brain injury (http://www.npr.org/2012/02/20/147058173/army-moves-to-act-fast-on-battlefield-brain-injuries; Note: Oklahoma Mental Health Code, OSC Title 43A, specifically excludes the effects of traumatic brain injury from considerations for involuntary commitment.), our legal system has treated people with mental illness to a double standard: lower standards of evidence and higher standards of scrutiny than even for murderers, gang-bangers, drug dealers and child molesters. Where it is said in criminal law that ten guilty men should go free lest one innocent man be convicted, the practice in mental health law effectively commits two innocent people to get the third, on the basis of what they are thinking and are suspected of being capable of doing in the future. Or because they have few advocates, and those involved in their “treatment” are often frightened of lawsuits after future violence. Even the Supreme Court has indicated that it is permissible to coerce people with mental illnesses into incriminating themselves without counsel, despite the fact that many innocent people in serious criminal investigations do the same thing, without the extra trauma and stress to which people with mental illnesses are subject and vulnerable.
46. Our legal system has long treated mental illness as if it was all one thing, like a surgeon performing the same radical excision on every cancer from benign prostate tumors to raging incurable melanoma. Despite all scandals and forcible commitments for insurance scams, it has pretended that “treatment” is not the same as punishment. Even when that “treatment” is no better than Harry Potter being locked under his relatives’ stairs, or similar to micro-management by an evil mother-in-law. Such double standards, depicting people with mental illnesses as those who don’t deserve the same legal rights and protections as others, have encouraged such agencies as the Tulsa Police Department to refrain from full and fair investigations, in order to achieve an arrest, and jurists such as Tulsa City and County Mental Health Court Judge Theresa Dreiling, in concert with the mental health section of the Public Defender’s Office, the District Attorney and such facilities as the Tulsa Center for Behavioral Health, to short-circuit the due process protections of even a prejudiced Mental Health Code to achieve and maintain a commitment.
47. These issues, as was the 1857 Dred Scott Decision, need to be reviewed at all levels up to the Highest Court.
What can you say for the Assistant District Attorney and her friend, the senior-hating, habitually lying landlady? They can write their names in the snow, and then punctuate them from across the courtroom.
*******
Anyone can have a “reasonable fear” of some thing or person. Self-righteous bigots do it all the time. In the 1980’s there were medical professionals in Springdale, Arkansas who presumably had a reasonable fear that giving someone narcotics for pain would get them hooked, and corrupt not only their morals, but those of the community. That’s likely why they made my Aunt Lucy die of excruciating ovarian cancer without painkillers, and maybe even a man in our church back around the ‘60s with bone cancer just as painful. It was their standard of care. Those people with titles before and letters after their names, just like the professionals the State of Oklahoma grants the right to decide who needs to be locked up, “for their own good”, in the same mental institutions that employ those professionals.
After all, “reasonable fear” is why many people if not most agree that no one with a mental illness should have a gun. As if mental illnesses are somehow all cause the same disabilities. As if no one can ever live with mental illness and not have any moral discipline about how it affects their actions. Like soldiers coming back from a war with PTSD. As if all the violent, paranoid, raging bullies who have never been formally diagnosed with a mental illness are somehow more safe and trustworthy. As if it is not easy and reliable to tell who is likely to commit future violence from their history of past violence.
Speaking as someone who grew up in a military family and went to grade school across the fence from Pearl Harbor, where the Japanese aircraft cannon shell pockmarks were still fresh after 12 years, I intend to challenge the Constitutionality of the Federal law, if I can, that says that anyone who has ever been committed to a mental facility, at any time for any reason, may never own firearms or ammunition again. No matter what the mental illness or its severity and effects; no matter the length of stay; no matter the falsehood of the accusations or diagnosis used against that person. As if mental institutions have not had a history for hundreds of years of abuse and scandal, including outright abducting people off the street for insurance profit in the U.S. as late as the 1990s, even children. As if anyone now can truly understand the human mind. As if the standards and methods of diagnosing it are based upon reliable physical tests, and not shot full of holes.
Those people that create a separate law and legal system, with lesser standards of evidence and proof for those with mental illnesses, make those they fear in their ignorance and intolerance into second-class citizens, creating a double standard of stupidity. It only forces people to hide their difficulties and leave them untreated. Until naivety or desperation impels them to take a chance on being labeled as forever unfit to have normal human reactions and emotions, much less allowed defend themselves against criminal attack, even another attack like one that may have started their difficulties. Leaving them with even lower social acceptance than the felons who would attack them.
Because I like irony, I just hope I get to do it while President Obama is still in office. Remember that his Administration has already tried to claim that all Veterans coming back from the Middle-East are mentally ill and should be banned from owning firearms. A political shot below the belt in my opinion, against those who are mostly Republicans. He will almost certainly have to send his Solicitor General to the Supreme Court to argue that there really is a minority that is so justly feared that its members cannot be allowed to defend themselves. And my response would be:
Oh, you mean like the Kluxers and Massas before them feared that people just like Mr. Obama would rise up and murder them in their beds, and called those people “crazy N-words”?
Which brings to mind a justifiable response to the question that most psychiatrists ask at the start of almost every session, “Are you thinking of hurting yourself or anyone else?”
“Oh, no, Massa – Ah never thinks of white women at all!”
Sunday, February 26th, Nelson Mandela appeared on NPR to talk about his life, including his experience with the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in South Africa after Aparthied. It occurs to me that we could use some of that in our court system. But lawyer-authors like John Grisham tell us that lawyers are almost if not proud that truth and justice are the first casualties in a trial. We are told that the object of a trial is not to find the truth, but to convince the jury by whatever means possible, while preserving the appearance of justice, so that the general public will be deceived into having faith in our justice system.
So in our adversarial (or confrontational) system of justice, the job of a lawyer is then to deny and distract from the truth at all costs. If for example, you say you have a disability and present doctor and hospital x-rays, CAT scans and MRIs of necrotic (dying) bone that looks like Swiss cheese, the opposing lawyer (in one case a U.S. Attorney, yet) will deny over and over again that this proves anything. And the Judge will let that lawyer go on like that for some time, without saying whether or not it is sufficient proof. If the local loony bin got a hold of you and you insisted on making those kinds of denial, in the face of that kind of evidence, you would likely get forced medication and a much longer stay, just for “losing touch” with reality.
We are also told, even if we can’t find a lawyer to stand with us, that we should speak to the court in legalese (whether we understand it or not) and not present to the court any “personal” information. Hold on a second. Isn’t that like saying that you can tell the court someone pushed you down the stairs, but not how much it hurt and terrified you to be ejected from your wheelchair. Or that the terror was so much the worse because someone had put you in that wheelchair by pushing you down some stairs before. I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds like an admission by the courts and legal community that injecting any amount of humanity into their process would corrupt their idea of justice.
Then there’s the practice of massive off-topic citations. If you file a suit and you are not a lawyer, the opposing lawyer is sure to demand that the case be dismissed, on grounds referring to a dozen or more citations of law and case law, that may be perfectly true but don’t honestly address your complaint. On the hope, of course, that you will utterly confused and intimidated by his or her superior expertise. For example, if you are suing a government official for violations of your civil rights under the color of law (42 U.S.C. Section 1983), the government’s lawyer will make a claim that government officials have “absolute immunity”. Namely, that no government official can be sued in the good-faith performance of that official’s duties. Which is perfectly true in that situation, but utterly irrelevant when that official does something stupid or corrupt that denies you the due process of law. Not to mention the fact that it is tough going for a layman to wade through all that legalese, and the Judge will not help by exposing the deception.
So in other words, it’s your fault if you present personal information in your arguments, but a lawyer is perfectly free to throw in all the garbage he or she can think of, so long as the lawyer puts it into “legalese”.
Then they go into an offended huff if we look at them like they’re crazy.
The MacArthur Study on the risk assessment of violence among people with mental illnesses
One should read this study (done over time in the 2000s, and freely available on the Internet) to understand the harm done to people with mental illnesses by a bias in society against them so deep, irrational and pervasive that it has even been enshrined into law. Otherwise, it might be too easy to dismiss a complaint by a person with a mental illness unexamined. As did Judge Kern, who was presented with copies of this study, repeatedly.
In short, this study finds that the risk of violence covers a wide range, with predictable extremes and a very large middle range where no prediction can be statistically accurate. One can compare it to predictions of which people who drink will commit violence under the influence, or maim and/or kill in drunk driving incidents. One can easily predict that teetotalers won’t, and that severe alcoholics, especially those with previous convictions, arrests, wrecks and damages to others, will. In between, the vast majority of social drinkers cannot be predicted with any reliability to become drunk drivers who cause injury and death. In other words, it's easy to characterize the tails of a bell curve and use them to tar all the rest. Like Rush Limbaugh with "sluts".
Now imagine a society of Christian and other Fundamentalists, where drinking alcohol is so feared and loathed that any who drink at any level are subject to lower standards of evidence, proof and justice - "For the protection of society". Where anyone who is merely accused of thinking about drinking and driving can be locked up. Where, in consideration of society's interest in public safety, it's not too much of an imposition on civil liberties to lock up any person so accused, until that person can prove to "expert examiners", known in the past as inquisitors, that he or she is not a danger to others. One might guess that a member of the Court might not like that shoe on his or her foot. If so, then living among the Taliban or Iranians or Saudis might not be advisable. They seem to be a bit prejudiced that way.
Or one might imagine a society where women who read trashy romantic novels might be locked up, just to satisfy the mullahs and rushlimbites, who fear “the corruption of our precious young!” Until those women can prove they are in no danger of becoming prostitutes and pole dancers. As some church lady might say, “You know Those People read that kind of trash!” One understands from the newspaper that even Judge Dreiling might be a tad inconvenienced by that standard of justice. A lot of people wouldn’t like those shoes on their feet, but find it perfectly acceptable to bind the feet of those less able to fight back.
It must feel very satisfying to have such an impact on “improving” society.
This wide range of inaccurate prediction has been shown by Monahan in “The Clinical Prediction of Violent Behavior” to cause the wrongful confinement of as many as 2 out of every 3 people judged by “expert opinion” to be dangerous (pp 44-47 re: Baxstrom v Herold, SCOTUS, 1966). See also FOUCHA v. LOUISIANA, 504 U.S. 71 (1992) regarding proof beyond a reasonable doubt at, “Its effect is at once both symbolic and practical, as a statement of values about respect and confidence in the criminal law”. On page 35, Monahan cites an example showing that even if the test for a marginal danger is 95% accurate, then 54 people will be incarcerated for every dangerous person set free. So much the worse at 33%. Thus, a rational examination of current judicial practices and standards of law for mental health shows that they have no credibility and deserve no respect or confidence. The fact that society and some Judges may not wish to know that their fear and loathing of people with mental illnesses has espoused and caused such a horrible result, does not make such bigotry and injustice any less monstrous or grievous.
We have a medical and legal name for serial monsters with a clear conscience – sociopaths.
Hate crimes against disability, even mental illness
Just thinking out loud here. What would constitute a Federal hate or civil rights crime against someone with a mental illness? Let’s look at some of the laws described on the FBI web site as “Federal Civil Rights Statutes”. Some require force or violence, others just conspiracy or intimidation. Which ones might apply to forcing into a detaining a person with mental illness in a mental institution under false pretenses?
Title 18, U.S.C. Section 241 – Conspiracy against rights “This statute makes it unlawful for two or more persons to conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person of any state, territory or district in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him/her by the Constitution or the laws of the United States, (or because of his/her having exercised the same).”
So, if a person with a mental illness engaged in free speech, even sharp and painful satire regarding some social condition, it might be a Federal crime to lie about the content of that speech, alleging a non-existent, non-spoken threat, so as to get that person committed to a mental institution. One might argue that it is a Federal crime to harass a resident in Federally-subsidized housing with legal service and eviction notices, based upon false testimony about free speech. Or, that it is a Federal crime for local authorities to fail to fully and impartially investigate false allegations leading to arrest and incarceration, merely because they are made against someone with a disability, even mental illness. Or a Federal crime to deprive such a person of due process, and arrange things such that the only sworn “witnesses”, “mental health evaluators”, and petitioners allowed came from the facility benefiting from the commitment. Or a Federal crime to fake evidence of outside medical history so as to justify a commitment and deprivation of civil rights.
There is no qualification here allowing Government officials at the local, state or federal level to hide behind “sovereign immunity” or “good faith performance of duties” if those officials in any way distorted facts or due process in order to achieve a commitment to a mental institution. Or, as the Oklahoma mental health code puts it, through “negligence or deficient professional skill”.
Title 18, U.S.C. Section 242 – Deprivation of rights under the color of law “This statute makes it a crime for any person acting under color of law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom to willfully deprive or cause to be deprived from any person those rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution and laws of the U.S.” … “Acts under "color of any law" include acts not only done by federal, state, or local officials within the bounds or limits of their lawful authority, but also acts done without and beyond the bounds of their lawful authority; provided that, in order for unlawful acts of any official to be done under "color of any law," the unlawful acts must be done while such official is purporting or pretending to act in the performance of his/her official duties. This definition includes, in addition to law enforcement officials, individuals such as Mayors, Council persons, Judges, Nursing Home Proprietors, Security Guards, etc., persons who are bound by laws, statutes ordinances, or customs.”
One can argue that this would make the unjust commitment to a mental institution a separate Federal crime, including such acts as false testimony and mental health evaluations to achieve that commitment. Again, there is no qualification here exempting even Federal Judges. One can even argue that 241 and 242 make illegal the Supreme Court’s 1979 decision allowing civil commitment on the basis of “clear and convincing evidence”, merely because it was just too hard for psychiatrists to distinguish between the few people who could be accurately predicted to commit violence and the rest of the bell curve. Not to mention any Federal Judge who would throw a case because one side had mental illness and was outspoken about it, while the other appeared to be “normal”.
Title 18, U.S.C., Section 245 – Federally Protected Activities This act prohibits the use of force or threat of force to discourage participation in a number of Federally protected activities and benefits. The definition of force here is not clear to me. Whether to not it includes misused of the courts, which are covered above.
Title 42, U.S.C., Section 3631 – Criminal Interference with Right to Fair Housing This act also refers to the use of force or threat of force in getting a place to live, and specifically mentions “handicap” as a basis for the crime.
So where are the lawyers, FBI and U.S. Department of Justice when all this is going on? Hiding in the woodwork, perhaps. Because, why waste time and energy on people few care about, when doing the right thing would go against the current norms of societal prejudice, and even upset some Federal Judges. Better that hundreds and thousands should be unjustly incarcerated than for such heroes to face that kind of music.
Well, Mizz Mental Facility Psychiatric Counselor, if they ever bring back witchburnin, which side a the fire you gonna be on? *****
You’re right – your God knows better than to like anyone you despise. Especially if He knows what’s good for Him. You can just go start Your own Church. *****
How is a court of law like a basketball court? The team with the best-paid players most often wins. *****
How is a court of law not like a basketball court? So long as the one side doesn’t know enough to object, the other side can commit all the fouls they want – in full view of the Ref. *****
In legal terms, Pro Se usually means that you have to represent yourself because you can’t afford a lawyer. Of which the lawyers like to say that you have a fool for a client. May be. Sure enough, if you step over some invisible line that only they and the Judges can see, you might get your case thrown out of court. But knowing where those invisible lines are, they get to be as outrageous and obnoxious as they please. And proud of it. *****
If you are representing yourself in court, Pro Se, and a lawyer from the other side compliments you on knowing all about the law, don’t agree or say nothing. It’s a trap where somewhere down the line, the lawyer will pick out some aspect of law that you didn’t know or weren’t clear about, and claim that you should lose because you knew better.
So instead stick your hand out and say, “Counselor, I would be honored to defend you against the death penalty! And I gaa-rone-tee you that by the end of the trial, you will get the all verdict you deserve! Now, that’ll be 500 dollars an hour. Up front.” *****
If the Judge accuses you of mocking the court, gaze around at the ceiling and walls and say, “Wow, they’re a tough audience, aren’t they?” *****
If he had recused himself because the gunman had shot some of us seniors who live on fixed incomes, and get into disputes with potential contributors to his campaigns, it wouldn’t have been about a conflict of interest. It would have been professional courtesy.
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Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
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Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
It’s bad enough that the rest of us who have faced trauma and mental illness are treated this way, but to do it to those whom we have asked to sacrifice the most in our defense is utterly reprehensible and disgusting. We ask them to take up arms in our defense and risk life and limb, and then treat them like lepers because of their experiences in doing the very things we asked of them?
The legislatures that pass mental health laws that treat people with mental illness like Southern plantation Darkies should be ashamed of themselves. The Courts, all the way up to the Supreme Court of the United States, which have handed down Dred-Scott-like rulings and opinions that justify those legislatures should be ashamed of themselves. The local courts, which ignore even those bigoted laws and higher court rulings, and deprive citizens with mental illness of due process should be ashamed of themselves. The local officials and police who treat people with mental illness to a lower standard of evidence and service, even in investigations of complaints, should be ashamed of themselves. Not to mention employers who indulge in and pander to common bigotry.
Even the EEOC, that purported bastion of civil rights and equal treatment, created a situation in its Enforcement Guidance on employment and psychiatric disabilities that amounted to political sabotage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. One of its examples required employers to put up with any surly and almost unwashed employee who couldn’t be trusted to behave around customers and co-workers. Both that and the Post Office shootings, occurring coincidentally about the same time, launched a tremendous backlash against the ADA. Aided and abetted by news media opinions equating the ADA to something requiring employers to hire ax murderers. Followed by a host of opportunistic employment “risk assessment” consultants that identified anyone with a mental illness as a potential threat of violence, using criteria without any medical or scientific validity. (Backlash Against the ADA, Ed by Linda Hamilton Krieger, University of Mich. Press, 2003; Sharing the Dream: Is the ADA Accommodating All?, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1998)
It has gotten so bad that no one with a mental illness can be allowed to have normal human emotions. Getting angry and raising one’s voice in outrage, as might anyone else in a similar situation, risks forcible drugging and incarceration by local and state authorities to “get control”, on the mere basis of any threat imagined to be “reasonable”. I hear that’s a cultural and humanitarian advance from lynching and burning at the stake.
And now our society is taking its fear and loathing out on Veterans who have fought for us overseas? My other comments on the matter cannot be printed in a family publication.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
“Reasonable fear” explains what happened to Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955 [http://www.emmetttillmurder.com/Emerge%201995.htm]. So many White Southerners back then had a “reasonable fear” about black men, even children, threatening white women, with even so little as a whistle used to correct a stutter. That’s how the Willie Horton ad helped George H.W. Bush win the 1988 Presidential election against Michael Dukakis. It induced some white people to have a “reasonable fear” that Dukakis would let black murderers out of jail to rape their white women. Any bigot can have a “reasonable fear”. The Oklahoma Mental Health Code directs it against people with mental illness.
The 1988 Random House Revised Edition College Dictionary defines bigot as “a person who is utterly intolerant of any creed, belief, or race that is not his own”. It defines chauvinism as “prejudiced devotion to any attitude or cause”. It defines prejudice as “an unfavorable opinion or feeling formed beforehand or without knowledge, thought or reason”. Which is all pretty much the same thing. A nice woman I know has or had a racist grandmother who would shout racial epithets out against any passing black person. To justify it, she said in so many words, “They don’t look like us. They don’t walk or talk like us. They don’t smell like us. They don’t think like us. They’re just different.”
Remember, “They don’t think like us”, “They’re just different”. And “reasonable people” feel threatened. Try this. Instead of saying a person with “a mental illness”, stick in “a woman who was asking for it with her short dress”, or “a young black male with a strutting walk”, or “a Native American holding a brown paper bag the size and shape of a bottle of Thunderbird”. Now imagine _that_ has been written into law. Nasty, isn’t it?
So it’s not unreasonable to think that the intellectual and philosophical inheritors of those white people who participated in the Tulsa race riots became legislators and found other people they can still treat with legitimized fear, loathing and contempt. Much safer targets, much less able and organized to fight back against bigotry. Imagine how much white Christian courage it took to pass that kind of law. Which, incidentally, the Attorney General of Oklahoma is proud to defend. Even when an Oklahoma Department and a Mental Health Court dispense with the protections of due process provided by a bigoted law, ignoring a great many “shall” clauses, and taking shortcuts of self-interest and convenience.
Still feel threatened? Try reading “The Clinical Prediction of Violent Behavior”, by John Monahan, circa 1980 (1995 softcover edition), Jason Aronson Inc., Northvale, NJ, London, 134 p. Then imagine a new form of breast or prostate/testicular cancer, for which the only treatment to avoid death is total removal of the breast or prostate and testicles. And the accuracy of the test for it equals that of the clinical prediction of violence – approximately 1/3 true positives, the rest false. Try that deal on for size. Especially if you are an Attorney General, Mental Health Court Judge, District Attorney, State psychiatrist, or legislator.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Among the Court papers I was given, Mental Health Court Judge Theresa Dreiling signed and filed on August 6, 2010 an “Order Setting Hearing and Directing Pre-Hearing Detention; and Order Releasing Confidential Records”. It’s a fill-in-the-blanks form, in which the printed fourth paragraph states, “WHEREAS, is appears further that the information sought is not available elsewhere and can only be obtained from the detaining and/or treating facility or the Department of Mental Health and Substance Services;”. Well now, that’s a falsehood, and evidently one written into usual Court procedure to give TCBH the monopoly on how the defendant’s mental state is represented to the Court. Pretty handy if the Judge intends to rubber-stamp TCBH decisions. It’s a falsehood because I told the TCBH people who interviewed me and the Court that I had been going to psychiatrists at the O.U. Psychiatric Clinic to manage my medications for depression and PTSD for the previous six or seven years. In fact, I still have appointment reminder cards going back to 2006. Who lied? TCBH, the Judge, or both?
As I may have noted before, all the “witnesses” who signed or were identified in sworn statements (in my possession), as to my need for incarceration in a mental facility, came either from the mental facility itself, or the organization that feeds it candidates for commitment, the Community Outreach Psychiatric Emergency Services (COPES). The are: Kevin Bethune, MALPC, of COPES, Aug 3, 2010; Ivan (or Juan) Lopes of TCBH (illegible title letters), Aug 3, 2010; Julie King, MS, LPC, Aug 5, 2010; and Dr. Lori C. Miller, MD, Aug 5, 2010. Perhaps more on their “testimony” another time. None of them appeared at the commitment hearing in my presence. Nor were they required to testify or be cross-examined, even though parts 5-411.5.b and 5-419.7 state that I “shall” have the right to cross-examine witnesses. Further, part 5-411.5.b states, “The petitioner and witnesses identified in the petition shall offer testimony under oath at the hearing on the petition.” And part 5-419.7 states that one “shall” be notified of “the right to call witnesses in such person’s own defense.” Not only did none of those things happen, Judge Dreiling did not even allow me to state my side of the case regarding the original allegations against me.
This occurred in secret session, with the smell of a kangaroo court. The Justices of the Oklahoma Supreme Court supervise the operations of the individual District Courts. Yet if one complains to a Justice about this kind of situation, the Justice does not deign to reply. Apparently the Supreme Court does not dedicate itself to extending the protections of due process to a minority that is often feared and loathed in common media representations and bigotry.
On September 9, 2010, Judge Dreiling held a hearing in Mental Health Court to review my commitment, attended by myself, Teri R. Terrell, Assistant Public Defender, Michelle Keely, Assistant District Attorney, and James Pfeffer, Assistant District Attorney, as well as others I seem to recall from TCBH and/or the Mental Health Court. ADA Keely took the lead in “defending” TCBH in order to keep me imprisoned. As I recall, when I complained about the alleged evidence against me, she claimed that she only needed “a preponderance of the evidence”. Neither Judge Dreiling nor my Public Defender objected to that false statement, and I didn’t know any better at the time.
Later I found that in the Addington v. Texas case of 1979 the U.S. Supreme Court, noting that civil commitment is “a significant deprivation of liberty”, set the standard at “clear and convincing evidence”, intermediate between “a preponderance of the evidence” and “beyond a reasonable doubt”. The Supreme Court did so because it did not think that states could prove anything “beyond a reasonable doubt” with psychiatry. I can believe that. Apparently it did not then nor has since considered the terrible inaccuracies of the psychiatric clinical predictions of violent behavior. The Oklahoma Mental Health Code cites eight times that the standard “clear and convincing evidence” shall be used. That would exclude damning “testimony” given by Mr. Bethune of COPES, which amounted to no more than unsworn hearsay, which was never fully investigated by the Tulsa Police Department, nor subjected to cross-examination in a court of law. Yet, though the Supreme Court standard has been in place for over 30 years, the Tulsa District Attorney’s Office is willing to lower its arguments to the level of a common grifter when dealing in secret with people having mental illness.
The Attorney General of Oklahoma has defended these ethical lapses in Federal District Court in case 11-CV-92-TCK-PJC, demanding that the case should be dismissed on the contention that state employees have absolute immunity from lawsuit for the “good-faith performance of their duties”. Yet, the U.S. Supreme Court held in United States v. Classic (1941) and Monroe v. Pape (1961) that there is no absolute immunity or total exemption for government officials as a class. They only have qualified immunity _within_ the good faith performance of their duties.
In Wood v. Strickland (1975) the Supreme Court states that a school official “must be held to a standard of conduct based not only on permissible intentions, but also on knowledge of the basic, unquestioned constitutional rights of his charges. Such a standard imposes neither an unfair burden upon a person assuming a responsible public office requiring a high degree of intelligence and judgment for the proper fulfillment of its duties, nor an unwarranted burden in light of the value which civil rights have in our legal system.” And “we hold that a school board member is not immune from liability for damages under § 1983 if he knew or reasonably should have known that the action he took within his sphere of official responsibility would violate the constitutional rights of the student affected, or if he took the action with the malicious intention to cause a deprivation of constitutional rights or other injury to the student.”
A U.S. Court of Appeals states in Rogers v. Okin (1984) that “the substantive rights created by legitimate, objective expectations derived from state law are entitled to the procedural protections of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” Regarding due process in Foucha v. Louisiana, 504 U.S. 71 (1992), the Supreme Court stated, “the substantive component of the Due Process Clause bars certain arbitrary wrongful government actions regardless of the fairness of the procedures used to implement them (Zinnerman v. Burch, 494 U.S. 113, 126) … but proof by a preponderance of the evidence fell short of satisfying due process.”
One might think that a Mental Health Court Judge in an Oklahoma District Court would and should know and strictly observe the Oklahoma Mental Health Code, the case law of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Constitution of the United States. Depriving a defendant of due process protections, even from an arguably bigoted law, on the basis of a psychiatric disability, does not meet these standards. It does not pass the smell test.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
This is what many of us hate about our legal system. The appearance of justice rather than its substance. The lack of access for those who cannot afford a lawyer. The dismissal of complaints based upon the inability of an untutored plaintiff to know the law completely upon entry into this system. There is often a time limit on complaints, and in order to enter a complaint without a lawyer, one has to do so before knowing how to make the complaint, or even the applicable laws. It is a learning process with which some Judges have no patience. If one can’t say it in the legal shorthand that a Judge finds preferable and efficient, one isn’t welcome in his Court. Or one might say Club.
Nor does this Judge have any patience with health problems. My progress and learning on this case have been hampered with chronic and acute conditions. Based upon this dismissal, he doesn’t want to hear about them at all. Painful back problems. Medications with disabling side effects. Food poisoning. Respiratory infections. Two trips to the Emergency Room and hospital stays last year with kidney and urinary tract infections, one on the morning of December 25th. Not to mention the depression and PTSD that the local loony bin used to justify its violations of my civil liberties. Justice, even the appearance of justice, it seems, is reserved for the healthy.
I’m thoroughly sick of this and tired. But I don’t see anyone else in this town speaking up about the egregious violations of due process foisted upon those of us with mental illnesses, just because we have mental illnesses. The alleged protectors of us poor people who don’t know what’s good for us have only convinced me that if there is ever a next time, it would be better not to be taken alive. And if taken alive, not to remain alive. Because it’s not about helping people overcome mental illness. It’s about making unpopular people “behave”. Rather like a communist re-education camp.
Maybe some people think that live is so infinitely precious that it is better to toe the line and endure that kind of repression. But it takes the bloom off the rose for me. It gives me a much greater appreciation for New Hampshire’s State Motto, uttered by Revolutionary War General John Stark on July 31, 1809. “Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils.” So until that happens, I hope to keep making this case, in whatever venue will hear it.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Now which authority would that be, says I?
The one that’s learned, earned and respected
Or the one that’s mean, petty, and vindictive
And likes itself too well?
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
“Why are we proud? We are proud first of all because from the beginning of this Nation - a man can walk upright. No matter who he is. Or who she is. He can walk upright and meet his friends, or his enemies. And he does not fear, because that enemy may be a position in great power. That he can be suddenly thrown in jail. To rot there without charges and no recourse to justice. We have the Habeus Corpus Act and we respect it.”
In the State of Oklahoma, that is not true for those of us with mental illness, and perhaps others. Summary arrest and detention can be accomplished merely on the false allegations of an accuser - without charges or investigation, without access to evidence, without examination of one’s accusers or a trial by jury, without access even to one’s own Doctors or Psychiatrists of long standing. Once guilt of wrong thinking has been decided by the Police and Community Outreach Psychiatric Emergency Services, one can be picked up and taken straight to the local loony bin. Where guilt is presumed merely because one is there. “If you didn’t do anything, then why are you here?” they say. After those same psychiatrists and counselors at that facility have ginned up the worst possible mental health evaluation to justify the false charges and involuntary commitment.
When a Federal Court refuses to hear such a case, with prejudice, without even considering the legal arguments advanced, it puts the lie to President Eisenhower’s statement at an even higher level.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Here is a partial list of the things to which the Public Defender’s Office does not bother to object in Mental Health Court:
the prejudiced failure of the Tulsa Police to investigate a complaint fully and impartially, or to take statements from witnesses other than the defendant’s accusers;
the lack of sworn statements or complaints from anyone outside of the mental health system;
the use of hearsay evidence as proven fact;
the unconstitutional lowering of the standard of evidence from “clear and convincing” to “a preponderance”;
the failure of the Mental Health Court Judge to appoint a mental health examining commission that is independent of the facility that will benefit by the commitment;
the false assertion that the only mental health information available comes from the mental health facility that will benefit from the commitment;
the dependence of the Mental Health Court Judge solely upon the mental health evaluations of the facility that will benefit from the commitment;
the artificial exaggeration of those evaluations by the facility to achieve a commitment;
the conflict of interest in allowing the facility psychiatrist who will treat the defendant serve as a “witness”, an “evaluator” and the petitioner for commitment;
the limitation of sworn “witnesses” solely to employees of the mental health facility and those who provide it with candidates for commitment;
a situation in which delivery to the facility causes the defendant extreme stress and upset, which cannot be separated from any condition prior to arrest, and is then used to justify commitment;
the proven propensity of innocent people to falsely incriminate themselves in such situations;
the fact proven by long-standing medical and legal research that the mental health facility cannot accurately predict the defendant’s alleged “dangerousness” better than about one time out of three, leaving the other two falsely incarcerated;
the refusal of the mental health facility or Mental Health Court Judge to obtain long-standing outside medical and psychiatric information and treatment records in consideration of the least intrusive alternative treatment;
and the refusal of the facility to release an inmate, including one who objects to commitment based on hearsay, on the basis that the inmate cannot prove the negative, that he or she is not a “danger” to anyone – in other words, incarceration based upon uncertainty rather than provable fact.
These are not tough concepts of injustice for the layman to grasp, much less honest, conscientious and experienced lawyers. One need only ask if this is the standard of evidence and justice one would want for one’s self. Unfortunately, outside of some public scandal, the public defenders, the mental facility “professionals” and the Mental Health Court Judge, have little if any incentive to reform. People with mental illnesses are unpopular, demonized in entertainment and the press. The penalties in State law for anything short of beating and raping a mental health inmate are almost non-existent. And even though Federal law and the Constitution have protections against such treatment, it seems the local Federal Court and Justice Department will not support due process for someone with a mental illness. Small wonder that few people with serious difficulties will “get help” voluntarily. Too often, it’s just a license for more of the kind of abuse that caused or aggravated the original condition.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
I can think of several examples in the courts. One lawyer for the local legal aide related attending a conference where eviction was a topic. She claimed to have asked one local judge if there is ever any defense against eviction. He reportedly said no. So any negligent, ruthless, abusive landlord, who habitually lies to a captive population of seniors, can provoke a statement from a stressed senior, manipulate it out of context, and add fabrications to justify an eviction. Even if the senior makes it to the local court, the court guarantees that the landlord cannot lose.
If you have a disability and wish to be sickened, read the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the 2002 Toyota v. Williams case. Using lengthy and tortured reasoning, the High Court allowed Toyota to dispose of any employee who could fill any position but one, due to disability. Toyota merely had to institute a system of job rotation through all the positions and claim that it was “business necessity”. A plausible but transparent ploy that the rest of us can see, and the Supreme Court took great pains to justify. The monocultural Japanese are famous for their intolerance of human difference. As they say, “The nail that stands up will be hammered down.” Just ask those maimed and shamed by mercury poisoning at Minamata.
Then read the 2001 Huffman v. OPM decision of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on the Whistleblower Protecton Act (WPA). Courts often complain about laws that add to their dockets. This court feared that “virtually every employee who was disciplined could claim protection of the Act.” So it gutted the WPA with tortured reasoning on the definition of the word “disclose”. It held that since a supervisor involved in wrongdoing already knew about it, the subordinate who alerted the supervisor to it could not be protected from retaliation under the WPA. That’s like saying that an innocent employee in a crime mob’s allegedly legitimate business, who alerted his or her supervisor to something he or she witnessed, could not be protected from torture and murder. In order to keep its case load down, and save itself the trouble of making necessary distinctions, the Federal Circuit artificially pinned the protection of the WPA not on the non-trivial consequences of the wrongdoing and retaliation, but upon the mere circumstances of the disclosure.
It seems from these examples that judges and lawyers too often relate to the rest of us, especially those without the means to afford them, the same way that Mitt Romney is currently unemployed. Or, changing a word in a line of Shakespeare, “He jests at scars who never felt a wound.” (Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, scene 2)
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
I’ve been a military dependent and on the move all my life until 2003, when I moved to Tulsa. I’ve seen good, bad and indifferent doctors and nurses. In the local loony bin, state psychiatrists perform the duties of both psychiatrist and physician, and may be fit for neither. Furthermore, after functioning as “witnesses”, mental health “evaluators”, and petitioners for commitment, these doctors and counselors, who benefit from the commitments, balk at even obtaining outside information from an patient’s doctors and psychiatrists of long standing. They absolutely refuse outside professionals the right to “practice” within their facility. Which other State psychiatrists honor, like those at the O.U. Psychiatric Clinic. Along with the Mental Health Court Judge, they certify, in a printed form, that the only medical information apparently available for use in commitment hearings comes from them. Very handy for keeping their personal and professional inadequacies safe from discovery, and filling the beds that presumably justify their salaries.
First, the Tulsa Center for “Behavioral Health” (TCBH) didn’t bother to take or obtain my full and complete medical history. I was 64 at the time with chronic conditions, and had to press even to get my previously prescribed medications considered. I didn’t even get all of them, like blood pressure and prostate medication. When I was having trouble with my blood pressure, I was told that my alleged doctor and psychiatrist, Dr. Lori Miller, had written an order refusing me medication unless my BP went above 150/100, when it was supposed to be kept at 100/70. High blood pressure tends to make me very irritable, not the best state of mind for someone allegedly being treated in a mental facility. It was common practice for the techs to ask me to raise my hand with the BP wrist cuff at or even above my heart if the first reading came out too high.
Later on, when I had a moderate asthma attack, I found that Dr. Miller had ordered my rescue inhaler be provided to me only at set medication times. As if asthma conforms to a schedule. In years past, before the advent of commonly available inhalers, I have had the gorilla sit on my chest in the night. But still the nurses on duty at the time would not “bother” the Doctor for an order to allow me access to the inhaler, and could not understand why I was so upset. When I finally got an order for access on the request of the patient, from Dr. Sarah Land I think, she did it not for the rescue inhaler, but the maintenance inhaler, which is normally used on a schedule. When I started having problems pissing, I got no medical help at all. Apparently having letters after one’s name does not assure medical diligence or competence.
There were other patients with other poorly treated problems. I saw one new patient convulsing on the floor, who was discounted as “seeking attention”. One young woman, who kept asking for a painkiller, Tramadol, showed me a four inch surgery scar in her abdomen. By the time she left, she was still skinny as a rail, and had a belly swelling too rapidly to be a pregnancy. It could have been anything from constipation to cancer.
One of my roommates had sleep apnea so bad that his breath repeatedly dropped to nothing, followed about a minute later by a gasp and extremely loud snoring. I was worried about him and raised a fuss, asking for a nurse to check on him. A tech told me in no uncertain terms that I was out of line and that my roommate had no problem beyond snoring. Although they could hear him down the hall, the nurse(s) refused to come.
The only person I ever heard of who got sent to a hospital, an old man with severe shaking due to medication, didn’t get sent until he started choking on his food. Only a schizophrenic woman, who suffered from hearing voices that encouraged her to severe self-mutilation, got continuous monitoring and physical care. These are just the ones I know about.
The psychiatrists only saw us about 30 minutes to an hour at most every week or two. At one meeting, Dr. Miller was unaware that I have major depression and that she had signed the order for my medication. Yet these fly-by physicians claimed to know us better than ourselves. If, after being familiar with one’s condition, treatment, and mis-treatment for nearly 60 years, one disagrees with their opinions, they accuse a person of not being “self aware”, or taking responsibility for one’s own actions.
The Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services alleges these people to be “trauma informed” and to provide appropriate services (http://www.ok.gov/odmhsas/Mental_Health_/Specialized_Programs_and_Services/Trama_Informed_Services/). Yet the at least one Counselor, Ms. Julie King, provided a cookie-cutter response to those of us with social difficulties: “If you are having problems with all these people, then what is the common denominator? The common denominator is you.” She also claimed that the only consideration that mattered in treatment was how others “perceive” the person with the health problems. In other words, the person who had been maimed, assaulted or abused had a duty to fix him or her self and stop bothering others with it.
Those make great punch lines for conservative politicians, but they have no healing function in psychiatry or medicine. It’s like telling a woman who was raped to get over it and back into bed, to service her husband in the manner he deserves. Or a cancer doctor telling a woman that her mastectomy scars will just be like the staples in a Playboy centerfold. Good luck to any returning Veteran with PTSD and other difficulties who gets caught up in their personal politics.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
According to one source, http://www.legal-explanations.com/definitions/bill-of-attainder.htm, the definition of Bill of Attainder is:
“(n) Bill Of Attainder is a legislative Act which declares a person or group as guilty of any crime, there by ordering punishment to them, without allowing them a chance to represent their cause or an unbiased trial to determine whether they are guilty. Many constitutions prohibit enacting of such Acts. This was practiced by English monarchies during eighteenth century.”
It is said that a criminal is convicted for only one of every ten criminal acts. Partly because the criminal most often goes undiscovered, and partly because in every trial, “It is better that ten guilty men go free than one innocent man be convicted.” This is the deal that gang-bangers, drug dealers, murderers and child molesters get. It doesn’t matter what people fear they might do, if they can’t prove criminals have actually done it. At least for the first time, in the case of child molesters. It doesn’t matter what a criminal might be thinking of doing in the future, because the criminal cannot be compelled to testify against himself.
Yet thirty years ago, medical and legal studies showed that the “experts” could predict the future likelihood of a person with mental illness committing violence only about one time in three; less than one time in two at best. A person with mental illness may be detained and examined on the mere hearsay or unsworn accusation of threat, even a false one. A person with mental illness can be examined by “experts” for fault without a trial, with the intent of inducing or coercing self-incrimination, without even a lawyer present. The local Mental Health Court currently accepts any recommendation the local “experts” give, without making sure that the accused person with mental illness has adequate and legally-mandated information on legal and constitutional rights, the opportunity to plead his or her case, or to call and examine witnesses. Even for the two times out of three that the “experts” are wrong, or have even artificially inflated mental health evaluations in aid of commitment, once the commitment has taken place, the accused is required to prove his or her thoughts are clean of all socially unacceptable taint. Otherwise the punishment and violation of civil liberties continues indefinitely, without any fixed term.
Why do violent criminals get so much better treatment in the law and courts than people with mental illnesses, who are merely accused of merely thinking of committing acts of violence? Who are merely accused of merely inducing a “reasonable fear” of threat in another person? Why are people with mental illnesses encouraged to incriminate themselves? Allegedly, it is for the benefit of people with mental illness and the safety of society. Yet if you ask those responsible to prove or demonstrate conclusively that, in spite of the vast majority of evidence to the contrary, people with mental illnesses actually benefit from this kind of vile, discriminatory treatment, or that society is actually safer, they can only fall back on the assertions that they know so because they have titles before and letters after their names.
And then there is the race issue. Most black people with such accusations against them get sent to jail. But you can’t examine black people without lawyers, and convict for their thoughts; there are civil rights laws against it. From what I’ve seen, the mental health facility inmates are predominately white. So one could say that the Oklahoma Mental Health Code is just a Bill of Jim Crow Attainder for white people. A way to exercise righteous bigotry on someone else, now that doing so to women and racial minorities is no longer legally or politically correct. The Supreme Court of Oklahoma, which is in charge of supervising the Mental Health Court in this mess, should be ashamed of itself for the extralegal violations of constitutional rights and civil liberties it has allowed to occur under the color of law.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
I have some personal experience with that. I know there are bigots in the TPD because I’ve met them and suffered from their bigotry. A few years back, after I complained to my apartment management that he wasn’t keeping his dog on a leash, a disabled man in a power chair chased me down on a public street just west of the apartments. He blocked me with his chair and made threatening references to what might happen if I didn’t stay out of his business. Having been threatened with death and assaulted more than once in my life, I call the TPD. When I tried to tell the responding Officer about how this bothered my PTSD, he immediately took the side of the cripple and threatened me with legal action. It took a letter to the TPD complaining about this discriminatory behavior to get a reasoned response. Sometime later, the cripple started accusing me to the apartment management of stalking and taking videos of him. I did no such thing. I’ve been an amateur photographer for decades, and often took pictures around the apartments and neighborhood. The guy was more that a little paranoid.
When I got into it with a new apartment manager, and got very upset over an impossible deadline to get my several thousand pounds of property out of my apartment, it seems the manager sicced COPES (the Community Outreach Psychiatric Emergency Services) and the TPD on me. Several people from COPES and two TPD Officers showed up to interview me. One Officer did all the talking. The other sat there with a superior looking smirk on his face, as is to say that he wouldn’t waste his time dealing with a nut case. Long after the TPD showed up to arrest me in front of my neighbors and friends, and cart me off to the local loony bin, I found out from neighbors, who could have testified that the manager and at least one of her employees were habitual liars, that the TPD had not bothered to interview any of them. At various times during the next 66 days after my arrest and detention, the loony bin “professionals”, the Mental Health Court and the District Attorney’s Office beat me over the head with false, unsworn allegations, as if they had been proven to be true.
My neighbors, whom the TPD did not interview, have refused my requests to voluntarily testify in my defense. I can’t blame them much for feeling that way. They watched what happened to me when I went up against the management with mere satire. They watched the TPD do it. They are poor and afraid of being evicted, too, if they say anything. They know that the TPD and District Attorney will look out for the business before its customers, and has absolutely no duty or interest in protecting them. They may even have some legitimate fear of being dismissed outright, as being out of touch with reality, as was I.
There are two cases of special interest to me: Arpin v. Santa Clara Valley Transportation Agency, 261 F.3d 912 (9th Cir. 2001), in which a PD was successfully sued for not pursuing an independent investigation; and Wilson v. Lawrence County, 260 F.3d 946 (8 Cir. 2001), where the court denied police qualified immunity because they failed to investigate other leads in a murder case. As the Court said in Wilson, “Law enforcement officers, like prosecutors, have a responsibility to criminal defendants to conduct their investigations and prosecutions fairly as illustrated by the Brady line of cases requiring the state to disclose exculpatory evidence to the defense.” The reviewer of the case at the IACP conference noted: “If Wilson’s evidence proves credible at trial, the failure to investigate could lead to a finding that their inaction was reckless or intentional, thus supporting a due process claim.”
Until the TPD and its Officers change their attitudes on how they protect (for which the courts have declared they have no legal duty) and serve (which they only do on their individual senses of responsibility), who’s going to trust and cooperate with them, but those whom they _prefer_ to serve and protect.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Now, this kind of power over thought might seem like a Mental Heath Court’s or Department of Mental Health facility’s moist dream. But I can assure you from personal experience that they are not interested in imposing physical death. They are quite happy with crushing independent thought, and ruining a person’s life with a permanent official label of potential violence.
Why will Police not investigate, the District Attorney and “mental health professionals” not believe, or a Court not hear the witness and claims of someone with a mental illness? Because bigots are their own proof.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Betimes it came to pass that Morton Thiokol Managers did lawyereth and lobbyeth their Engineers mightily.
This did they say unto their Engineers.
If thou canst not prove that thy rings-of-O shall fail, thou must then giveth thy blessing to the Launch that it may proceed.
Verily, the Engineers, not able to giveth such proof, did giveth instead their blessing.
Even though it sateth not well among them.
And lo, it did come to pass that their Space Shuttle did climbeth partway unto Heaven.
And then did falleth all the way back down.
And then some.
Then did the Engineers beat their breasts and give up a great wailing unto the Heavens.
For those lives they had lost without need.
When their Space Shuttle did falleth from the sky.
Deep into the bottomless Sea.
For they had been Fools, lawyereth by Fools.
Verily, Verily, I say unto thee.
Thou canst and mayest and shall not lawyereth the Natural Law which was made by God.
In the mere Appearance of that which seemeth Good to thee.
For then thy Dams shall they fail, and thy Bridges and thy Buildings shall they fall.
And those that dependeth upon thee shall they die.
And thus, in the peril of thy Soul, thou wilt gnash thy teeth and cry great tears of sorrow unto the Heavens.
For thou art and shalt be known a Fool.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
41. Considering that people with mental illnesses have long been treated with fear and loathing out of all rational proportion to their actual and minimal threat, even before the Salem witch trials, the Plaintiff intends to challenge the entire manner how people with mental illnesses have been treated within and without the law, legally and extra-legally. Despite over 30 years of medical and legal research to the contrary, our legal system has based its treatment of people with mental illnesses on the presumed basis of a higher level of “dangerousness”, pretending that this is not the same as a presumption of guilt, even though the consequences to and deprivations of civil liberties are much the same. Even though the rate of violence among people with mental illness is only slightly higher than the general population, limited mostly to those with a prior history of violence and substance abuse, and even though research has shown 30 years ago that clinical prediction of violent behavior is less accurate than one in two, more often like one in three, our legal system has allowed such “expert testimony” to destroy the civil liberties of any person with any mental illness, no matter the lack of any significant history of violence, both temporarily and permanently.
42. See “The Clinical Prediction of Violent Behavior”, John Monahan, circa 1979-1980, National Institute of Mental Health and Jason Aronson, Inc., 134 p (amazon.com). See “Psychiatric Disabilities, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the New Workplace Violence Account”, Vicki A. Laden and Gregory Schwartz, Berkeley Journal of Employment & Labor Law, Vol 21(246-270), circa 2000, available on the Internet. See The MacArthur Foundation Risk Assessment Study, circa 2001-2005, on the Internet. See Chapter 5, Psychiatric Disabilities and the ADA, of “Sharing the Dream: Is the ADA Accommodating All?”, a report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights which was product of a two-day hearing conducted by the Commission on November 12–13, 1998, was available at http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/ada/ch5.htm). See “Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit” by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker, circa 1996 (amazon.com).
If nothing else, these sources will demonstrate that the only consistently and truly violent people with mental illnesses are those that have already been violent, especially those who abuse drink and drugs.
43. For example, in ADDINGTON V. TEXAS, 441 U. S. 418 (1979) the High Court stated, “The reasonable doubt standard is inappropriate in civil commitment proceedings because, given the uncertainties of psychiatric diagnosis, it may impose a burden the state cannot meet, and thereby erect an unreasonable barrier to needed medical treatment. The state should not be required to employ a standard of proof that may completely undercut its efforts to further the legitimate interests of both the state and the patient that are served by civil commitments.” It did so without consideration of the 228 references, from 1922 to 1980, cited by Monahan in “The Clinical Prediction of Violent Behavior”. And without consideration Prof. Monahan’s finding of the terrible inaccuracy of such predictions, that would wrongly condemn as many as two out of every three persons found “guilty” of the likelihood of future violence due to mental illness, by the use of the standard of “clear and convincing evidence” in actual psychiatric practice. It may not be quite as bad as throwing an alleged and tied up witch into a pond to see if the water rejects her, but if this Court of Appeals cannot reconsider such matters at its level, it may at least pass them on to the Supreme Court.
44. There is also the matter of who actually needs and benefits from the “treatment”, the captive, involuntary patients, or the doctors and facilities who find it necessary for their continued profit and employment. The High Court has not adequately addressed the matter of how many and badly innocent people are damaged by these presumptions, processes and “treatments”. This, despite many cases and decades of scandal, abuse and outright abduction of vulnerable people for profit.
45. Even though some mental illnesses cannot often be reliably distinguished from traumatic brain injury (http://www.npr.org/2012/02/20/147058173/army-moves-to-act-fast-on-battlefield-brain-injuries; Note: Oklahoma Mental Health Code, OSC Title 43A, specifically excludes the effects of traumatic brain injury from considerations for involuntary commitment.), our legal system has treated people with mental illness to a double standard: lower standards of evidence and higher standards of scrutiny than even for murderers, gang-bangers, drug dealers and child molesters. Where it is said in criminal law that ten guilty men should go free lest one innocent man be convicted, the practice in mental health law effectively commits two innocent people to get the third, on the basis of what they are thinking and are suspected of being capable of doing in the future. Or because they have few advocates, and those involved in their “treatment” are often frightened of lawsuits after future violence. Even the Supreme Court has indicated that it is permissible to coerce people with mental illnesses into incriminating themselves without counsel, despite the fact that many innocent people in serious criminal investigations do the same thing, without the extra trauma and stress to which people with mental illnesses are subject and vulnerable.
46. Our legal system has long treated mental illness as if it was all one thing, like a surgeon performing the same radical excision on every cancer from benign prostate tumors to raging incurable melanoma. Despite all scandals and forcible commitments for insurance scams, it has pretended that “treatment” is not the same as punishment. Even when that “treatment” is no better than Harry Potter being locked under his relatives’ stairs, or similar to micro-management by an evil mother-in-law. Such double standards, depicting people with mental illnesses as those who don’t deserve the same legal rights and protections as others, have encouraged such agencies as the Tulsa Police Department to refrain from full and fair investigations, in order to achieve an arrest, and jurists such as Tulsa City and County Mental Health Court Judge Theresa Dreiling, in concert with the mental health section of the Public Defender’s Office, the District Attorney and such facilities as the Tulsa Center for Behavioral Health, to short-circuit the due process protections of even a prejudiced Mental Health Code to achieve and maintain a commitment.
47. These issues, as was the 1857 Dred Scott Decision, need to be reviewed at all levels up to the Highest Court.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
*******
Anyone can have a “reasonable fear” of some thing or person. Self-righteous bigots do it all the time. In the 1980’s there were medical professionals in Springdale, Arkansas who presumably had a reasonable fear that giving someone narcotics for pain would get them hooked, and corrupt not only their morals, but those of the community. That’s likely why they made my Aunt Lucy die of excruciating ovarian cancer without painkillers, and maybe even a man in our church back around the ‘60s with bone cancer just as painful. It was their standard of care. Those people with titles before and letters after their names, just like the professionals the State of Oklahoma grants the right to decide who needs to be locked up, “for their own good”, in the same mental institutions that employ those professionals.
After all, “reasonable fear” is why many people if not most agree that no one with a mental illness should have a gun. As if mental illnesses are somehow all cause the same disabilities. As if no one can ever live with mental illness and not have any moral discipline about how it affects their actions. Like soldiers coming back from a war with PTSD. As if all the violent, paranoid, raging bullies who have never been formally diagnosed with a mental illness are somehow more safe and trustworthy. As if it is not easy and reliable to tell who is likely to commit future violence from their history of past violence.
Speaking as someone who grew up in a military family and went to grade school across the fence from Pearl Harbor, where the Japanese aircraft cannon shell pockmarks were still fresh after 12 years, I intend to challenge the Constitutionality of the Federal law, if I can, that says that anyone who has ever been committed to a mental facility, at any time for any reason, may never own firearms or ammunition again. No matter what the mental illness or its severity and effects; no matter the length of stay; no matter the falsehood of the accusations or diagnosis used against that person. As if mental institutions have not had a history for hundreds of years of abuse and scandal, including outright abducting people off the street for insurance profit in the U.S. as late as the 1990s, even children. As if anyone now can truly understand the human mind. As if the standards and methods of diagnosing it are based upon reliable physical tests, and not shot full of holes.
Those people that create a separate law and legal system, with lesser standards of evidence and proof for those with mental illnesses, make those they fear in their ignorance and intolerance into second-class citizens, creating a double standard of stupidity. It only forces people to hide their difficulties and leave them untreated. Until naivety or desperation impels them to take a chance on being labeled as forever unfit to have normal human reactions and emotions, much less allowed defend themselves against criminal attack, even another attack like one that may have started their difficulties. Leaving them with even lower social acceptance than the felons who would attack them.
Because I like irony, I just hope I get to do it while President Obama is still in office. Remember that his Administration has already tried to claim that all Veterans coming back from the Middle-East are mentally ill and should be banned from owning firearms. A political shot below the belt in my opinion, against those who are mostly Republicans. He will almost certainly have to send his Solicitor General to the Supreme Court to argue that there really is a minority that is so justly feared that its members cannot be allowed to defend themselves. And my response would be:
Oh, you mean like the Kluxers and Massas before them feared that people just like Mr. Obama would rise up and murder them in their beds, and called those people “crazy N-words”?
Which brings to mind a justifiable response to the question that most psychiatrists ask at the start of almost every session, “Are you thinking of hurting yourself or anyone else?”
“Oh, no, Massa – Ah never thinks of white women at all!”
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Sunday, February 26th, Nelson Mandela appeared on NPR to talk about his life, including his experience with the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in South Africa after Aparthied. It occurs to me that we could use some of that in our court system. But lawyer-authors like John Grisham tell us that lawyers are almost if not proud that truth and justice are the first casualties in a trial. We are told that the object of a trial is not to find the truth, but to convince the jury by whatever means possible, while preserving the appearance of justice, so that the general public will be deceived into having faith in our justice system.
So in our adversarial (or confrontational) system of justice, the job of a lawyer is then to deny and distract from the truth at all costs. If for example, you say you have a disability and present doctor and hospital x-rays, CAT scans and MRIs of necrotic (dying) bone that looks like Swiss cheese, the opposing lawyer (in one case a U.S. Attorney, yet) will deny over and over again that this proves anything. And the Judge will let that lawyer go on like that for some time, without saying whether or not it is sufficient proof. If the local loony bin got a hold of you and you insisted on making those kinds of denial, in the face of that kind of evidence, you would likely get forced medication and a much longer stay, just for “losing touch” with reality.
We are also told, even if we can’t find a lawyer to stand with us, that we should speak to the court in legalese (whether we understand it or not) and not present to the court any “personal” information. Hold on a second. Isn’t that like saying that you can tell the court someone pushed you down the stairs, but not how much it hurt and terrified you to be ejected from your wheelchair. Or that the terror was so much the worse because someone had put you in that wheelchair by pushing you down some stairs before. I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds like an admission by the courts and legal community that injecting any amount of humanity into their process would corrupt their idea of justice.
Then there’s the practice of massive off-topic citations. If you file a suit and you are not a lawyer, the opposing lawyer is sure to demand that the case be dismissed, on grounds referring to a dozen or more citations of law and case law, that may be perfectly true but don’t honestly address your complaint. On the hope, of course, that you will utterly confused and intimidated by his or her superior expertise. For example, if you are suing a government official for violations of your civil rights under the color of law (42 U.S.C. Section 1983), the government’s lawyer will make a claim that government officials have “absolute immunity”. Namely, that no government official can be sued in the good-faith performance of that official’s duties. Which is perfectly true in that situation, but utterly irrelevant when that official does something stupid or corrupt that denies you the due process of law. Not to mention the fact that it is tough going for a layman to wade through all that legalese, and the Judge will not help by exposing the deception.
So in other words, it’s your fault if you present personal information in your arguments, but a lawyer is perfectly free to throw in all the garbage he or she can think of, so long as the lawyer puts it into “legalese”.
Then they go into an offended huff if we look at them like they’re crazy.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
One should read this study (done over time in the 2000s, and freely available on the Internet) to understand the harm done to people with mental illnesses by a bias in society against them so deep, irrational and pervasive that it has even been enshrined into law. Otherwise, it might be too easy to dismiss a complaint by a person with a mental illness unexamined. As did Judge Kern, who was presented with copies of this study, repeatedly.
In short, this study finds that the risk of violence covers a wide range, with predictable extremes and a very large middle range where no prediction can be statistically accurate. One can compare it to predictions of which people who drink will commit violence under the influence, or maim and/or kill in drunk driving incidents. One can easily predict that teetotalers won’t, and that severe alcoholics, especially those with previous convictions, arrests, wrecks and damages to others, will. In between, the vast majority of social drinkers cannot be predicted with any reliability to become drunk drivers who cause injury and death. In other words, it's easy to characterize the tails of a bell curve and use them to tar all the rest. Like Rush Limbaugh with "sluts".
Now imagine a society of Christian and other Fundamentalists, where drinking alcohol is so feared and loathed that any who drink at any level are subject to lower standards of evidence, proof and justice - "For the protection of society". Where anyone who is merely accused of thinking about drinking and driving can be locked up. Where, in consideration of society's interest in public safety, it's not too much of an imposition on civil liberties to lock up any person so accused, until that person can prove to "expert examiners", known in the past as inquisitors, that he or she is not a danger to others. One might guess that a member of the Court might not like that shoe on his or her foot. If so, then living among the Taliban or Iranians or Saudis might not be advisable. They seem to be a bit prejudiced that way.
Or one might imagine a society where women who read trashy romantic novels might be locked up, just to satisfy the mullahs and rushlimbites, who fear “the corruption of our precious young!” Until those women can prove they are in no danger of becoming prostitutes and pole dancers. As some church lady might say, “You know Those People read that kind of trash!” One understands from the newspaper that even Judge Dreiling might be a tad inconvenienced by that standard of justice. A lot of people wouldn’t like those shoes on their feet, but find it perfectly acceptable to bind the feet of those less able to fight back.
It must feel very satisfying to have such an impact on “improving” society.
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This wide range of inaccurate prediction has been shown by Monahan in “The Clinical Prediction of Violent Behavior” to cause the wrongful confinement of as many as 2 out of every 3 people judged by “expert opinion” to be dangerous (pp 44-47 re: Baxstrom v Herold, SCOTUS, 1966). See also FOUCHA v. LOUISIANA, 504 U.S. 71 (1992) regarding proof beyond a reasonable doubt at, “Its effect is at once both symbolic and practical, as a statement of values about respect and confidence in the criminal law”. On page 35, Monahan cites an example showing that even if the test for a marginal danger is 95% accurate, then 54 people will be incarcerated for every dangerous person set free. So much the worse at 33%. Thus, a rational examination of current judicial practices and standards of law for mental health shows that they have no credibility and deserve no respect or confidence. The fact that society and some Judges may not wish to know that their fear and loathing of people with mental illnesses has espoused and caused such a horrible result, does not make such bigotry and injustice any less monstrous or grievous.
We have a medical and legal name for serial monsters with a clear conscience – sociopaths.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Just thinking out loud here. What would constitute a Federal hate or civil rights crime against someone with a mental illness? Let’s look at some of the laws described on the FBI web site as “Federal Civil Rights Statutes”. Some require force or violence, others just conspiracy or intimidation. Which ones might apply to forcing into a detaining a person with mental illness in a mental institution under false pretenses?
Title 18, U.S.C. Section 241 – Conspiracy against rights
“This statute makes it unlawful for two or more persons to conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person of any state, territory or district in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him/her by the Constitution or the laws of the United States, (or because of his/her having exercised the same).”
So, if a person with a mental illness engaged in free speech, even sharp and painful satire regarding some social condition, it might be a Federal crime to lie about the content of that speech, alleging a non-existent, non-spoken threat, so as to get that person committed to a mental institution. One might argue that it is a Federal crime to harass a resident in Federally-subsidized housing with legal service and eviction notices, based upon false testimony about free speech. Or, that it is a Federal crime for local authorities to fail to fully and impartially investigate false allegations leading to arrest and incarceration, merely because they are made against someone with a disability, even mental illness. Or a Federal crime to deprive such a person of due process, and arrange things such that the only sworn “witnesses”, “mental health evaluators”, and petitioners allowed came from the facility benefiting from the commitment. Or a Federal crime to fake evidence of outside medical history so as to justify a commitment and deprivation of civil rights.
There is no qualification here allowing Government officials at the local, state or federal level to hide behind “sovereign immunity” or “good faith performance of duties” if those officials in any way distorted facts or due process in order to achieve a commitment to a mental institution. Or, as the Oklahoma mental health code puts it, through “negligence or deficient professional skill”.
Title 18, U.S.C. Section 242 – Deprivation of rights under the color of law
“This statute makes it a crime for any person acting under color of law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom to willfully deprive or cause to be deprived from any person those rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution and laws of the U.S.”
…
“Acts under "color of any law" include acts not only done by federal, state, or local officials within the bounds or limits of their lawful authority, but also acts done without and beyond the bounds of their lawful authority; provided that, in order for unlawful acts of any official to be done under "color of any law," the unlawful acts must be done while such official is purporting or pretending to act in the performance of his/her official duties. This definition includes, in addition to law enforcement officials, individuals such as Mayors, Council persons, Judges, Nursing Home Proprietors, Security Guards, etc., persons who are bound by laws, statutes ordinances, or customs.”
One can argue that this would make the unjust commitment to a mental institution a separate Federal crime, including such acts as false testimony and mental health evaluations to achieve that commitment. Again, there is no qualification here exempting even Federal Judges. One can even argue that 241 and 242 make illegal the Supreme Court’s 1979 decision allowing civil commitment on the basis of “clear and convincing evidence”, merely because it was just too hard for psychiatrists to distinguish between the few people who could be accurately predicted to commit violence and the rest of the bell curve. Not to mention any Federal Judge who would throw a case because one side had mental illness and was outspoken about it, while the other appeared to be “normal”.
Title 18, U.S.C., Section 245 – Federally Protected Activities
This act prohibits the use of force or threat of force to discourage participation in a number of Federally protected activities and benefits. The definition of force here is not clear to me. Whether to not it includes misused of the courts, which are covered above.
Title 42, U.S.C., Section 3631 – Criminal Interference with Right to Fair Housing
This act also refers to the use of force or threat of force in getting a place to live, and specifically mentions “handicap” as a basis for the crime.
So where are the lawyers, FBI and U.S. Department of Justice when all this is going on? Hiding in the woodwork, perhaps. Because, why waste time and energy on people few care about, when doing the right thing would go against the current norms of societal prejudice, and even upset some Federal Judges. Better that hundreds and thousands should be unjustly incarcerated than for such heroes to face that kind of music.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Well, Mizz Mental Facility Psychiatric Counselor, if they ever bring back witchburnin, which side a the fire you gonna be on?
*****
You’re right – your God knows better than to like anyone you despise. Especially if He knows what’s good for Him. You can just go start Your own Church.
*****
How is a court of law like a basketball court?
The team with the best-paid players most often wins.
*****
How is a court of law not like a basketball court?
So long as the one side doesn’t know enough to object, the other side can commit all the fouls they want – in full view of the Ref.
*****
In legal terms, Pro Se usually means that you have to represent yourself because you can’t afford a lawyer. Of which the lawyers like to say that you have a fool for a client. May be. Sure enough, if you step over some invisible line that only they and the Judges can see, you might get your case thrown out of court. But knowing where those invisible lines are, they get to be as outrageous and obnoxious as they please. And proud of it.
*****
If you are representing yourself in court, Pro Se, and a lawyer from the other side compliments you on knowing all about the law, don’t agree or say nothing. It’s a trap where somewhere down the line, the lawyer will pick out some aspect of law that you didn’t know or weren’t clear about, and claim that you should lose because you knew better.
So instead stick your hand out and say, “Counselor, I would be honored to defend you against the death penalty! And I gaa-rone-tee you that by the end of the trial, you will get the all verdict you deserve! Now, that’ll be 500 dollars an hour. Up front.”
*****
If the Judge accuses you of mocking the court, gaze around at the ceiling and walls and say, “Wow, they’re a tough audience, aren’t they?”
*****
If he had recused himself because the gunman had shot some of us seniors who live on fixed incomes, and get into disputes with potential contributors to his campaigns, it wouldn’t have been about a conflict of interest. It would have been professional courtesy.