The civilly-committed public mental patient and the right to aftercare.

Constitutional law--mental health--a patient involuntarily civilly committed to a state mental hospital has a constitutional right to treatment.

o'Connor v. Donaldson: due process and the involuntarily civilly committed mental patient.

The Antidotes to the Double Standard: Protecting the Healthcare Rights of Mentally Ill Inmates by Blurring the Line Between Estelle and Youngberg.

This Note is an examination of mentally ill inmates' constitutional right to treatment. It has significant doctrinal and practical implications. In terms of doctrine, the Supreme Court has created distinct standards for the minimum levels of care for inmates (Estelle) and the civilly committed mentally ill (Youngberg). Under this framework mentally ill inmates are constitutionally equivalent to...

The right to community treatment for mentally disordered sex offenders.

In 1990, Earl Shriner, a released pedophile, raped a seven-yearold boy, severed the boy’s penis, and left him to die. The public outrage that followed this horrific incident in Tacoma, Washington led to the passage of that state’s Sexually Violent Predator (“SVP”) law. The law provides for post-incarceration psychiatric commitment of sex offenders who suffer from a “mental abnormality or person...

The impact of the right to refuse treatment in a forensic patient population: six-month review.

In December of 1987, the Wisconsin supreme court held that all involuntarily committed mental patients in the state had the right to refuse psychotropic medication unless a court held that they were incompetent to make treatment decisions. The authors studied the effects of this decision in a 165-bed forensic hospital over the first six months after implementation of the decision. They found th...