To the Honorable Senator/Congressman (Fill In The Blank):
I miss the American Dream. Losing the Dream has been devastating to both my physical and mental health. The last time I was happy, I had a job and hope for the future. I want my own place, both to live and in productive society. I want to build a business, or at least a secure retirement. I don’t ever want to worry about homelessness again.
So I would really appreciate it if one of your staffers could take the time to find and send me the name of the millionaire or billionaire who is willing to offer me either a job or venture capital - out of his humongous tax cuts.
Has anyone else been having trouble with AT&T DSL internet bills? Before I moved to a new apartment in October 2010, I had a reasonable and stable phone bill. LifeLine phone service and $19.95 DSL service came to about $24 every month, give or take some change. Then I moved and set up service in the new apartment, using my previously acquired DSL modem/router.
The AT&T agent offered me DSL service for $14.95 a month, and led me to believe that my voice line service would be about $20 a month plus surcharges, adding up to about $27, with a Ľ payment for the $51 new customer charge. Since the first bill covered only Oct 21st to Oct 26th, voice line services were prorated and the October 27th bill came to $54.74.
The next bill (November 27th) came to a whopping $88.04, in large part because the internet charge was $39.90 instead of $14.95. A typical bait and switch. In my 15 months of service I have had to call repeatedly to get bills adjusted. AT&T made repeated promises to fix my bill for good, and except for one month, never kept them. Including the first DSL charge, the charges have been as follows: $39.90 (November 2010), $39.06, $24.55 CR(credit), $35.00, $14.95, $5.10 CR, $35.00, $9.95, $30.00, $30.00, $10.91 CR, $5.10 CR, $5.10 CR, $44.22 (Dec 2012). Note that the amount of $14.95 appears only once in that list – one out of fourteen.
In January 2011, after getting the previous bill adjusted, followed by an overcharge again in December, I sent an e-mail complaining of billing fraud. AT&T promptly followed this with threat to disconnect service for allegedly unpaid charges of $58.62, which were never explained. Not even the AT&T agent who next adjusted my bill could explain where that came from.
Either the AT&T billing system is so unnecessarily complicated that neither its employees nor its computers can understand and deal with it, or it is set up this way deliberately, to extract higher fees from people who don’t want to argue about it, especially the elderly. In my opinion, it rises to the level of wire fraud and should be investigated as such. For anyone who wants to see, I’ve set up a web site with the entire set of bills and my phone notes at http://www.android-originals.com/blogs/AT&T Mess/AT&T Mess.html
"You're Asking Us?" Are you familiar with the term "rhetorical question"? One hears that even journalists use it on occasion to stimulate deeper realization and thinking.
This Martin Luther King Day, people speak as if solving discrimination for women, gays and people of color would end it all. Then they continue to act like a flock of ducks, excluding and pecking at the injured one with a limp because it’s different. Thirty years after hundreds of legal and medical research papers found that only a small minority of people with mental illness, primarily those with violent histories, are significantly more violent than the general population, people who otherwise pride themselves on their commitment to civil rights still tolerate subjecting those with mental illness to discriminatory laws, secret and invisible courts, violations of due process and civil liberties, and violations of 30-year-old Supreme Court standards of evidence. If they think of it at all, they pat themselves on the back for “helping” people into the State-sponsored Guantanamos in their own back yards. Places where the people who run the facilities provide the only evidence, evaluation and judgment needed, transmuting what would be gossip and hearsay in a criminal case into Revealed Truth.
From the late 1980s to late 1990s, a scandal erupted in mental health care. Private mental institutions in states from Nevada to Texas to Florida used tactics such as dragooning people off the streets or enrolling them in false dieting programs. Some of them paid bounties to outside contractors to drag people in, much like medical schools of past centuries paid grave robbers for cadavers to dissect. Just so the mental hospitals could milk medical insurance. Military families and veterans were favorite targets because of generous benefits. The impact, especially on children, was horrific.
It is unknown if mental facilities sponsored by the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services milk insurance. But there is no doubt that they prey on the misery of others. One may wonder if they keep their jobs by inflating evaluations of illness and “dangerousness” just to keep enough beds filled. Then, as one outside mental health case manager noted, when someone has a real crisis, the beds are too often full.
Where is our legal system in all this? The local mental health court is part of the city/county District Court. Each Justice of the Oklahoma Supreme Court supervises the District Courts in a designated section of the State. One might think that this would mean actively assuring that equal standards of justice, evidence and due process apply to all who come before those courts. Apparently not. One can complain to the Supervising Justice about gross violations in a local court, but one cannot expect to get any response.
As it happens, the Justice in charge of this section shares Dr. King’s much abused color. He arguably holds the highest position of his race in this State. His lack of response, along with some rulings and opinions of Justice Clarence Thomas, demonstrates that even a man of color in the highest position does not flinch from applying Jim Crow law to a minority that is not his.
There are several things terribly wrong with the Oklahoma Mental Health Code, Title 43A. One is the presumption that anyone with a mental illness is a second class citizen, not deserving the same standards of justice as any other citizen. Among others is the presumption that if any of those other citizens feel “threatened” by someone with mental illness, the fault lies automatically with the person with mental illness, who then has to be “fixed” by State counselors and psychiatrists. This denies the notions and existence of bigotry and simple dishonest malice in their entirety. For another, it encourages law enforcement and prosecuting authorities to use State mental facilities to detain and punish people they cannot otherwise prosecute under the law. For another, the Code fails to take into account the conflict of interest inherent in allowing the counselors and psychiatrists of a State mental facility to decide who should be incarcerated there. These do not exhaust the list.
Let us consider the last, conflict of interest. For the 1995 Session, the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission of the Virginia General Assembly presented a “Review of the Involuntary Commitment Process”. In the main this report considered the budgetary costs and possible improvements in the expense of mental health operations in the State of Virginia. Thus any humanitarian or civil liberty improvement recommended also had to have the effect of reducing the expenditures for such operations.
Recommendation (26) stated “for adult commitment hearings … a qualified evaluator who is not and will not be treating the individual, who has no significant financial interest, and who is not employed by the facility to which the individual will be committed should complete the mental health evaluation. The independent evaluator should also be expected to attend and testify at the commitment hearing.” In other words, those who run a State mental facility should be strictly divorced from the process of deciding who gets put there, so as to avoid an abuse of power, incarcerating individuals without true necessity, that would cost the State money. And they should show up and be prepared to justify their findings, possibly subject to cross-examination.
Title 43A almost says that, but not quite. 43A-1-105 states, “No person admitted to any facility shall be considered or presumed to be mentally or legally incompetent except those persons who have been determined to be mentally or legally incompetent in separate and independent proceedings of an appropriate district court.” But it does not adequately state how those proceedings shall be “separate and independent”.
43A-5-104 states, “Any person who intentionally falsely attests to the mental illness, alcohol dependency, or drug dependency of any person, or whose false attestations as to mental illness, alcohol dependency, or drug dependency of any person is proved to be the result of negligence or deficient professional skill, or who signs such an evaluation or petition for pecuniary reward, or promise thereof, or other consideration of value or operating to his or her advantage, other than the professional fee usually paid for such service, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor, and, upon conviction thereof, shall be punished by payment of a fine not to exceed One Thousand Dollars ($1,000.00), or imprisonment in the county jail not to exceed one (1) year, or both such fine and imprisonment.” But it does not explicitly recognize that this could be a problem in allowing mental facility personnel to effectively decide for the Mental Health Court Judge who should be committed to the facility.
43A-10-109a.A.7 states that uniform policies for ODMHSAS personnel shall ensure that “no employee whose responsibilities relate in any manner to services provided to or on behalf of a vulnerable adult is subject to a conflict of interest which would impair the ability of the employee to carry out his or her employment duties in an impartial manner”. Yet it does not fully and explicitly define and enumerate possible conflicts of interest, such as the unethical practice of allowing treating physicians at the facility to decide for the Mental Health Court Judge who needs their involuntary “help”.
While 43A clearly indicates that it is a bad idea for the staff of an State or State-sponsored mental facility to make the evaluation or decision for involuntary commitment, for the jailers to decide who gets jailed, it does not does not make explicit prohibitions against such unethical behavior. Except in a round-about manner it 43A-5-104.
This ignores the long and squalid history of psychiatric institutions abusing their legal powers and patients. Psychiatrists and counselors at mental facilities have a natural tendency and self-interest to find that people need their services. Some decades past, such mental facilities were forced to release most of their inmates because of horrible abuses and inhumane treatment. For example, one harmless man was kept for years because he played an imaginary trumpet, and another for talking to an imaginary wife. But no one took up the slack with out-patien programs for those people, so they became the mentally ill homeless sleeping on the streets up to today. Even after that, psychiatric hospitals have been caught in insurance scams, snatching ordinary people off the streets and committing them just to milk their medical insurance. Even children.
So when, as in the City and County of Tulsa, the Mental Health Court Judge depends almost exclusively upon the evaluations of mental facility personnel, there are no checks and balances to restrict commitments to those who need such “help” and have no other alternative. The commitment process is not “separate and independent” as required in 43A-1-105, and taxpayers bear the burden. For an involuntary commitment, the treating psychiatrist from the facility can be the “witness”, “mental health evaluator” and petitioner for commitment. Thus ensuring a steady supply of involuntary “consumers”.
Furthermore, once an inmate is incarcerated, the facility psychiatrists and other personnel are the sole arbiters of who gets out when. Because the Judge typically rubber-stamps their decisions, disagreeing only to keep an inmate longer. This is a corrupt and corrupting system, costing the State money by filling beds without true medical necessity, and having them full when those people, if any, who really need such help can’t get it. There are no true checks and balances.
I defy anyone involved in this sordid process to demonstrate otherwise. Especially that any significant number of people brought before it, allegedly to be “helped”, have actually escaped it. Title 43A states in several places that those who are found not to be in need or are no longer in need of such “consumer services” shall be released immediately. Yet where are any independent checks and balances to make sure that this is done? They don’t exist. The local Mental Health Court Judge and mental facility will even go so far as to deny that an individual’s psychiatrists of long standing exist or have any say in the process. And if those psychiatrists are employed by the State, say at the University of Oklahoma, they will abandon a patient to avoid any confrontation with their fellow State employees. So much for the Hippocratic Oath, “First, do no harm”.
Until the State Legislature sees fit to cease imposing its bent version of Sharia Law upon those of us with mental illness, until it restores to us and protects our constitutional rights to be treated with equal justice and due process, many more will face this psychiatric tyranny. And have their lives permanently damaged in this ugly process.
I contend that the shortcut of allowing mental facility to do the mental health evaluations that determine the need for commitment cannot save any money. That in the long run, this can only be done by accepting the cost of bringing in outside and truly independent mental health evaluators, who have utterly no self-interest in filling beds in the facility.
I can agree that commercial corporations are not people, but no such restrictions on campaign spending, lobbying and advertising should apply to the non-profit corporations that allow like-minded people to band together and seek to advance whatever cause they represent. That is the only way that ordinary people can compete politically with the rich and well-funded. News media, for example, are well-funded by effective taxes on the public through the advertising dollars that consumer dollars make possible. We buy products and some of that money gets spent funding news outlets which we may have had no intention of supporting. And no news outlet, which reaches millions of people, is entirely free of bias and self-interest. So if a major segment of the news media starts beating up on those ordinary non-rich people whom it sees as demons, how else can the demonized fight back in the political arena effectively? Five and ten dollar donations from a few million members adds up. News media and corporations are not obliged to support our values and issues with the money they get from us. But the non-profit lobbies that we support directly do. They are our voices and should be recognized as such. Some of us might vote the other ticket, if it's candidate had not pledged to do things that hurt us, just to please his or her party's wing nuts. When the politicians are selected by the most extreme elements of their parties, and the news media demonstrate whatever biases they have with politically selective reporting, how else can we make our voices heard?
Don’t you wish our political parties would give us candidates for President that we could all feel good voting for? No more liars who pander one way on the campaign trail and then work the other way in secret when elected. No more wing nuts. No more clueless wonders who think that their millions or party credentials make them qualified to lead a nation to their idea of salvation.
Does anyone else remember what happened to the last tell-it-like-it-is, verbal bomb throwing, true conservative Presidential candidate who went up against a liberal Democrat? I’ll give you some hints. His comments on how to use nuclear weapons in Asia and the Kremlin prompted one of the most successful negative TV ads in history, a little girl counting flower petals, followed by a countdown to a mushroom cloud. He lost in a landslide of those voting for Lyndon Baines Johnson. He earned the nickname “Barry the Bomber”.
Do you want to scare an independent at election time? Run an ad asking, “Nuclear Newt – do you really want his finger on the trigger?” Or run one of a Federal Judge handing down a decision that an independent would like, but would upset the Religious Right. Followed by men in black masks throwing a hood over the Judge in court, and dragging him off to Guantanamo.
Nor are Romney and Paul immune. Romney’s idea of job creation could be depicted by an entire generation of workers wearing McDonald’s uniforms. An effective attack ad might contrast Romney’s idea of a mortgage problem to those of the rest of us. This man who thinks that $375,000 in speaking and book income is pocket change. And imagine an ad showing tyrants, terrorists and China going hog wild after Paul pulls U.S. military forces out of even friendly countries. Or starving children and seniors after WIC, food stamps and social security are cut off.
Of course, President Barrack Obama is no LBJ. LBJ had a long history of arm-twisting success getting things done in the Congress, and was a gun-rights Democrat who actively hunted. Obama, on the other hand, merely promised fidelity to the Second Amendment in his campaign. After which high officials of his employ in the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms set up Operation “Fast and Furious”, which instructed firearms dealers in southern border states to allow suspect sales to proceed, sending hundreds of guns to drug cartels in Mexico.
Why? To gin up a campaign for gun control justified by phony claims that most drug guns in Mexico come from firearms dealers in the U.S. And what about dead Mexicans and one U.S. Border Patrol Officer? According to the statements of high BATF officials, “You have to break some eggs to make an omelet.” Naturally, President Obama and his supporters in the news media don’t want that buck stopping at his desk. But it raises the potential for a truly effective attack ad addressing Obama’s honesty, and the reckless disregard of his administration for the human lives of people of color south of the border.
Our parties sure know how to pick ‘em.
It has been written that George Washington didn’t campaign to be the Father of our country. That he simply did it because it needed to be done, he was qualified, and no one else was available. The current crop of contenders merely illustrate the old adage that the person who most wants to run for an office is usually the one least qualified to fill it. Or that testosterone poisoning may win votes, but it doesn’t solve problems.
There may be legitimate businesses out there who think that their time is so valuable that they shouldn’t have to waste time waiting for you to answer the phone while it rings. But nothing says “grifter” like a robo-caller. It’s impossible to miss. You say “hello” at least twice into dead air before the person who allegedly made a personal call to you picks up their phone to answer back. And then usually it’s a robot telling you that your credit card account is OK, but you can do better if you take their offer. When a real person actually answers, you can often hear the noise of a boiler room call center in the background.
But a matchmaking business? Yeah, I know. I’m old, I’m ugly, I’m poor and my health isn’t so good. Even if one did get find it by accident looking at dating sites on the internet, who would I be kidding? But a callback from matchmaking business? Here you go looking for one of the most intimate and private relationships one can possibly have, and they use a robo-caller. With boiler room noise. Nothing says romance like a robo-caller, eh? I’d say it sets a new standard. ***
Somehow, I just don’t believe in trickle-down economics. What the first George Bush called “voodoo economics”. Tell me how many ordinary middle class jobs Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich have created out of their own millions of income. How many factories have they built? How many stores have they opened? How many new technologies have they helped to create making direct venture capital investments in small businesses with their own money? How many microloans have they made to help ordinary people? How many mortgages have they or their wealth personally financed to help people reach the American Dream? Without a record of experience and accomplishment like that, who are they to tell us that they can lead us out of the recession. Without efforts like those, it's all just posturing to justify paying lower taxes than middle class working people.
And Obama reminds me of an old joke of mine. You know you might be a lawyer if your pants are on fire. But if the fire has spread from your pants to your belly, then you know you’re a politician.
Speaking of lawyers; they like to build their arguments on the “reasonable person” hypothesis. A “reasonable person” is one whose thoughts and actions are so right and reasonable, that no one could possibly disagree with them. A lawyer often tells a jury what a “reasonable person” would think and find to save the jury the trouble of being reasonable persons and thinking for themselves. I say again, let’s send that guy to Congress – then we’ll get something done. Or dare one say, President?
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.
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COMMENTS
Posted by: Don B
208 comments total
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Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
I miss the American Dream. Losing the Dream has been devastating to both my physical and mental health. The last time I was happy, I had a job and hope for the future. I want my own place, both to live and in productive society. I want to build a business, or at least a secure retirement. I don’t ever want to worry about homelessness again.
So I would really appreciate it if one of your staffers could take the time to find and send me the name of the millionaire or billionaire who is willing to offer me either a job or venture capital - out of his humongous tax cuts.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
The AT&T agent offered me DSL service for $14.95 a month, and led me to believe that my voice line service would be about $20 a month plus surcharges, adding up to about $27, with a Ľ payment for the $51 new customer charge. Since the first bill covered only Oct 21st to Oct 26th, voice line services were prorated and the October 27th bill came to $54.74.
The next bill (November 27th) came to a whopping $88.04, in large part because the internet charge was $39.90 instead of $14.95. A typical bait and switch. In my 15 months of service I have had to call repeatedly to get bills adjusted. AT&T made repeated promises to fix my bill for good, and except for one month, never kept them. Including the first DSL charge, the charges have been as follows: $39.90 (November 2010), $39.06, $24.55 CR(credit), $35.00, $14.95, $5.10 CR, $35.00, $9.95, $30.00, $30.00, $10.91 CR, $5.10 CR, $5.10 CR, $44.22 (Dec 2012). Note that the amount of $14.95 appears only once in that list – one out of fourteen.
In January 2011, after getting the previous bill adjusted, followed by an overcharge again in December, I sent an e-mail complaining of billing fraud. AT&T promptly followed this with threat to disconnect service for allegedly unpaid charges of $58.62, which were never explained. Not even the AT&T agent who next adjusted my bill could explain where that came from.
Either the AT&T billing system is so unnecessarily complicated that neither its employees nor its computers can understand and deal with it, or it is set up this way deliberately, to extract higher fees from people who don’t want to argue about it, especially the elderly. In my opinion, it rises to the level of wire fraud and should be investigated as such. For anyone who wants to see, I’ve set up a web site with the entire set of bills and my phone notes at
http://www.android-originals.com/blogs/AT&T Mess/AT&T Mess.html
Re: Love Letters/Hate Mail
Are you familiar with the term "rhetorical question"? One hears that even journalists use it on occasion to stimulate deeper realization and thinking.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
From the late 1980s to late 1990s, a scandal erupted in mental health care. Private mental institutions in states from Nevada to Texas to Florida used tactics such as dragooning people off the streets or enrolling them in false dieting programs. Some of them paid bounties to outside contractors to drag people in, much like medical schools of past centuries paid grave robbers for cadavers to dissect. Just so the mental hospitals could milk medical insurance. Military families and veterans were favorite targets because of generous benefits. The impact, especially on children, was horrific.
It is unknown if mental facilities sponsored by the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services milk insurance. But there is no doubt that they prey on the misery of others. One may wonder if they keep their jobs by inflating evaluations of illness and “dangerousness” just to keep enough beds filled. Then, as one outside mental health case manager noted, when someone has a real crisis, the beds are too often full.
Where is our legal system in all this? The local mental health court is part of the city/county District Court. Each Justice of the Oklahoma Supreme Court supervises the District Courts in a designated section of the State. One might think that this would mean actively assuring that equal standards of justice, evidence and due process apply to all who come before those courts. Apparently not. One can complain to the Supervising Justice about gross violations in a local court, but one cannot expect to get any response.
As it happens, the Justice in charge of this section shares Dr. King’s much abused color. He arguably holds the highest position of his race in this State. His lack of response, along with some rulings and opinions of Justice Clarence Thomas, demonstrates that even a man of color in the highest position does not flinch from applying Jim Crow law to a minority that is not his.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Let us consider the last, conflict of interest. For the 1995 Session, the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission of the Virginia General Assembly presented a “Review of the Involuntary Commitment Process”. In the main this report considered the budgetary costs and possible improvements in the expense of mental health operations in the State of Virginia. Thus any humanitarian or civil liberty improvement recommended also had to have the effect of reducing the expenditures for such operations.
Recommendation (26) stated “for adult commitment hearings … a qualified evaluator who is not and will not be treating the individual, who has no significant financial interest, and who is not employed by the facility to which the individual will be committed should complete the mental health evaluation. The independent evaluator should also be expected to attend and testify at the commitment hearing.” In other words, those who run a State mental facility should be strictly divorced from the process of deciding who gets put there, so as to avoid an abuse of power, incarcerating individuals without true necessity, that would cost the State money. And they should show up and be prepared to justify their findings, possibly subject to cross-examination.
Title 43A almost says that, but not quite. 43A-1-105 states, “No person admitted to any facility shall be considered or presumed to be mentally or legally incompetent except those persons who have been determined to be mentally or legally incompetent in separate and independent proceedings of an appropriate district court.” But it does not adequately state how those proceedings shall be “separate and independent”.
43A-5-104 states, “Any person who intentionally falsely attests to the mental illness, alcohol dependency, or drug dependency of any person, or whose false attestations as to mental illness, alcohol dependency, or drug dependency of any person is proved to be the result of negligence or deficient professional skill, or who signs such an evaluation or petition for pecuniary reward, or promise thereof, or other consideration of value or operating to his or her advantage, other than the professional fee usually paid for such service, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor, and, upon conviction thereof, shall be punished by payment of a fine not to exceed One Thousand Dollars ($1,000.00), or imprisonment in the county jail not to exceed one (1) year, or both such fine and imprisonment.” But it does not explicitly recognize that this could be a problem in allowing mental facility personnel to effectively decide for the Mental Health Court Judge who should be committed to the facility.
43A-10-109a.A.7 states that uniform policies for ODMHSAS personnel shall ensure that “no employee whose responsibilities relate in any manner to services provided to or on behalf of a vulnerable adult is subject to a conflict of interest which would impair the ability of the employee to carry out his or her employment duties in an impartial manner”. Yet it does not fully and explicitly define and enumerate possible conflicts of interest, such as the unethical practice of allowing treating physicians at the facility to decide for the Mental Health Court Judge who needs their involuntary “help”.
While 43A clearly indicates that it is a bad idea for the staff of an State or State-sponsored mental facility to make the evaluation or decision for involuntary commitment, for the jailers to decide who gets jailed, it does not does not make explicit prohibitions against such unethical behavior. Except in a round-about manner it 43A-5-104.
This ignores the long and squalid history of psychiatric institutions abusing their legal powers and patients. Psychiatrists and counselors at mental facilities have a natural tendency and self-interest to find that people need their services. Some decades past, such mental facilities were forced to release most of their inmates because of horrible abuses and inhumane treatment. For example, one harmless man was kept for years because he played an imaginary trumpet, and another for talking to an imaginary wife. But no one took up the slack with out-patien programs for those people, so they became the mentally ill homeless sleeping on the streets up to today. Even after that, psychiatric hospitals have been caught in insurance scams, snatching ordinary people off the streets and committing them just to milk their medical insurance. Even children.
So when, as in the City and County of Tulsa, the Mental Health Court Judge depends almost exclusively upon the evaluations of mental facility personnel, there are no checks and balances to restrict commitments to those who need such “help” and have no other alternative. The commitment process is not “separate and independent” as required in 43A-1-105, and taxpayers bear the burden. For an involuntary commitment, the treating psychiatrist from the facility can be the “witness”, “mental health evaluator” and petitioner for commitment. Thus ensuring a steady supply of involuntary “consumers”.
Furthermore, once an inmate is incarcerated, the facility psychiatrists and other personnel are the sole arbiters of who gets out when. Because the Judge typically rubber-stamps their decisions, disagreeing only to keep an inmate longer. This is a corrupt and corrupting system, costing the State money by filling beds without true medical necessity, and having them full when those people, if any, who really need such help can’t get it. There are no true checks and balances.
I defy anyone involved in this sordid process to demonstrate otherwise. Especially that any significant number of people brought before it, allegedly to be “helped”, have actually escaped it. Title 43A states in several places that those who are found not to be in need or are no longer in need of such “consumer services” shall be released immediately. Yet where are any independent checks and balances to make sure that this is done? They don’t exist. The local Mental Health Court Judge and mental facility will even go so far as to deny that an individual’s psychiatrists of long standing exist or have any say in the process. And if those psychiatrists are employed by the State, say at the University of Oklahoma, they will abandon a patient to avoid any confrontation with their fellow State employees. So much for the Hippocratic Oath, “First, do no harm”.
Until the State Legislature sees fit to cease imposing its bent version of Sharia Law upon those of us with mental illness, until it restores to us and protects our constitutional rights to be treated with equal justice and due process, many more will face this psychiatric tyranny. And have their lives permanently damaged in this ugly process.
I contend that the shortcut of allowing mental facility to do the mental health evaluations that determine the need for commitment cannot save any money. That in the long run, this can only be done by accepting the cost of bringing in outside and truly independent mental health evaluators, who have utterly no self-interest in filling beds in the facility.
Re: Future Election Shock
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Does anyone else remember what happened to the last tell-it-like-it-is, verbal bomb throwing, true conservative Presidential candidate who went up against a liberal Democrat? I’ll give you some hints. His comments on how to use nuclear weapons in Asia and the Kremlin prompted one of the most successful negative TV ads in history, a little girl counting flower petals, followed by a countdown to a mushroom cloud. He lost in a landslide of those voting for Lyndon Baines Johnson. He earned the nickname “Barry the Bomber”.
Do you want to scare an independent at election time? Run an ad asking, “Nuclear Newt – do you really want his finger on the trigger?” Or run one of a Federal Judge handing down a decision that an independent would like, but would upset the Religious Right. Followed by men in black masks throwing a hood over the Judge in court, and dragging him off to Guantanamo.
Nor are Romney and Paul immune. Romney’s idea of job creation could be depicted by an entire generation of workers wearing McDonald’s uniforms. An effective attack ad might contrast Romney’s idea of a mortgage problem to those of the rest of us. This man who thinks that $375,000 in speaking and book income is pocket change. And imagine an ad showing tyrants, terrorists and China going hog wild after Paul pulls U.S. military forces out of even friendly countries. Or starving children and seniors after WIC, food stamps and social security are cut off.
Of course, President Barrack Obama is no LBJ. LBJ had a long history of arm-twisting success getting things done in the Congress, and was a gun-rights Democrat who actively hunted. Obama, on the other hand, merely promised fidelity to the Second Amendment in his campaign. After which high officials of his employ in the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms set up Operation “Fast and Furious”, which instructed firearms dealers in southern border states to allow suspect sales to proceed, sending hundreds of guns to drug cartels in Mexico.
Why? To gin up a campaign for gun control justified by phony claims that most drug guns in Mexico come from firearms dealers in the U.S. And what about dead Mexicans and one U.S. Border Patrol Officer? According to the statements of high BATF officials, “You have to break some eggs to make an omelet.” Naturally, President Obama and his supporters in the news media don’t want that buck stopping at his desk. But it raises the potential for a truly effective attack ad addressing Obama’s honesty, and the reckless disregard of his administration for the human lives of people of color south of the border.
Our parties sure know how to pick ‘em.
It has been written that George Washington didn’t campaign to be the Father of our country. That he simply did it because it needed to be done, he was qualified, and no one else was available. The current crop of contenders merely illustrate the old adage that the person who most wants to run for an office is usually the one least qualified to fill it. Or that testosterone poisoning may win votes, but it doesn’t solve problems.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
But a matchmaking business? Yeah, I know. I’m old, I’m ugly, I’m poor and my health isn’t so good. Even if one did get find it by accident looking at dating sites on the internet, who would I be kidding? But a callback from matchmaking business? Here you go looking for one of the most intimate and private relationships one can possibly have, and they use a robo-caller. With boiler room noise. Nothing says romance like a robo-caller, eh? I’d say it sets a new standard.
***
Somehow, I just don’t believe in trickle-down economics. What the first George Bush called “voodoo economics”. Tell me how many ordinary middle class jobs Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich have created out of their own millions of income. How many factories have they built? How many stores have they opened? How many new technologies have they helped to create making direct venture capital investments in small businesses with their own money? How many microloans have they made to help ordinary people? How many mortgages have they or their wealth personally financed to help people reach the American Dream? Without a record of experience and accomplishment like that, who are they to tell us that they can lead us out of the recession. Without efforts like those, it's all just posturing to justify paying lower taxes than middle class working people.
And Obama reminds me of an old joke of mine. You know you might be a lawyer if your pants are on fire. But if the fire has spread from your pants to your belly, then you know you’re a politician.
Speaking of lawyers; they like to build their arguments on the “reasonable person” hypothesis. A “reasonable person” is one whose thoughts and actions are so right and reasonable, that no one could possibly disagree with them. A lawyer often tells a jury what a “reasonable person” would think and find to save the jury the trouble of being reasonable persons and thinking for themselves. I say again, let’s send that guy to Congress – then we’ll get something done. Or dare one say, President?
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.