Claim: Lawsuit filed against county mental health agency.
Verdict: SUPPORTS

Retrieved passages:
title: Laura's Law
text: trial and was sent to Atascadero State Hospital and was later transferred to California's Napa State Hospital. After the incident Laura's parents chose to advocate for assisted outpatient treatment of individuals considered to have mental illness. The law is only operative in those counties in which the county board of supervisors, by resolution, authorizes its application and makes a finding that no voluntary mental health program serving adults, and no children's mental health program, was reduced in order to implement the law. In 2004, Los Angeles County implemented Laura's Law on a limited basis. Since the passage of the MHSA,

title: New York Civil Liberties Union
text: D-35th S.D., during the 2009 legislative session. In May 2007, the NYCLU (attorney Chris Hansen), along with Mental Hygiene Legal Services and Kirkland & Ellis LLP, filed a lawsuit against Kings County Hospital Center in Brooklyn. The lawsuit described the hospital's psychiatric emergency room and inpatient unit as "a chamber of filth, decay, indifference and danger", and sought to end abusive treatment in the hospital's psychiatric facilities. The conditions at the hospital drew national attention in 2008 when the NYCLU released security camera footage of a woman dying on the hospital's waiting room floor, after hospital staff ignored her for

title: Laura's Law
text: bests describes it as part of the recovery movement. In November 2004, California voters passed Proposition 63. When the California Department of Mental Health (DMH) released its draft plan requirements for county mental health administrators on February 15, 2005, they contained a provision that would allow MHSA funds to be used for "involuntary services" if certain criteria were met. Nevada County's Laura's Law program and Los Angeles County's AOT pilot project are utilizing MHSA funding for services. As stated above, the patient must have a serious mental illness plus a recent history of psychiatric hospitalizations, jailings or acts, threats or

title: NYC Health + Hospitals
text: four consecutive years for its use of information technology in safety, quality, customer service, business processes and workforce training. Conditions at the psychiatric unit of the Kings County Hospital Center in Brooklyn, one of 11 HHC hospitals, remain the subject of a lawsuit and scrutiny by the press. In May 2007, the New York State Mental Hygiene Legal Service, the New York Civil Liberties Union, and Kirkland & Ellis, a private law firm, filed a lawsuit against Kings County Hospital. The plaintiffs charged that its psychiatric unit was "a chamber of filth, decay, indifference and danger." The May 2007 lawsuit

title: Ginger Lerner-Wren
text: County Mental Health Court have received numerous honors and recognition related to the innovation of the Court, the application of Therapeutic Jurisprudence, and for the humanitarian treatment of persons with severe mental illness. The Broward County Mental Health Court, through its application of Therapeutic Jurisprudence, is recognized as best practice and showcased at The White House Conference on Mental Health in 1999. It was the model for the Federal Legislation passed by Congress in 2000 in comprehensive Mental Health Act to promote Mental Health Courts nationwide (Mentally Ill Offender Treatment and Crime Reduction Act of 2000). The Council of State

title: Mental health court
text: strategy. Shortly after the establishment of the Broward County Mental Health Court, other mental health courts began to open in jurisdictions around the U.S., launched by practitioners who believed that standard punishments were ineffective when applied to the mentally ill. In Alaska, for example, the state's first mental health court (established in Anchorage in 1998) was spearheaded by Judge Stephanie Rhoades, who felt probation alone was inadequate. "I started seeing a lot of people in criminal misdemeanors who were cycling through the system and who simply did not understand their probation conditions or what they were doing in jail. I

title: Mental health court
text: patient's compliance with the treatment plan. Patients who did not follow the treatment plan faced sanctions, a modification of the plan, or if they were on diversion their original charge could be set for trial. Judge Goodman's concept and the original mental health court were dissolved in the early 1990s. In 1995, Judge Goodman was reprimanded for nepotism. In the mid-1990s, many of the professional mental health workers who had worked with Judge Goodman sought to re-establish a mental health court in Indianapolis. Representatives of the county's mental health service providers and other stake holders began meeting weekly. The group

title: NYC Health + Hospitals
text: alleged that patients at the Kings County Hospital "are subjected to overcrowded and squalid conditions often accompanied by physical abuse and unnecessary and punitive injections of mind-altering drugs." In December 2007, the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York began a separate investigation. In June 2008, the plaintiffs in the May 2007 lawsuit released a video of Esmin Green, a 49-year-old patient, dying on the floor of a waiting room in King County Hospital after waiting to be seen by at the psychiatric emergency department for more than 24 hours. Shortly

title: Bridgewater State Hospital
text: was the subject of a formal complaint that accused him of making a racial slur to a patient 2007, The Disability Law Center, a human rights advocacy firm in Boston, sued Bridgewater State Hospital over illegally restraining a patient. 2007 A patient committed suicide by hanging himself in the showers while there on a 30-day court evaluation when BSH staff failed to prevent it. 2004 The family of murdered inmate William Mosher planned to sue the state and BSH for $150 million for failing to protect their son. 2004 William Mosher Jr., a patient who suffered from bipolar disorder, was

title: Universal Health Services
text: psychiatric services or for the development of initial or continuing treatment plans. The settlement further resolved allegations that the entities filed false records or statements to Medicaid when they filed treatment plans that falsely represented the level of services that would be provided to the patients. On December 7, 2016, Buzzfeed published a report detailing questionable practices within UHS psychiatric facilities. The report includes allegations of holding nonthreatening patients against their will, manipulative misinterpretation of patient testimonies to fit guidelines to involuntary confinement, aggressive staff layoffs and understaffing in hospitals, needless patient deaths due to understaffing and misprescription of medication,

title: California Mental Health Services Act
text: other family members of individuals with severe mental illness, and various other community representatives. This diverse commission holds the responsibility of approving county implementation plans, helping develop mental illness stigma-relieving strategies, and recommending service delivery improvements to the state on an as-needed basis. Whenever the commission identifies a critical issue related to the performance of a county mental health program, it may refer the issue to the DMH. The first meeting of the MHSOAC was held July 7, 2005, at which time Proposition 63 author Darrell Steinberg was selected unanimously by fellow commissioners as chairman, without comment or discussion. After

title: 2014 Isla Vista killings
text: in the victims, and perceived emphasis on the rights of the mentally ill over the rights of victims. On March 2, 2015, the families of the three stabbing victims filed a federal lawsuit against the county, the sheriff's department, the apartment building and the property management. The wrongful death suit alleged that the defendants failed to recognize warning signs and take action to prevent the tragedy. On February 18, 2015, the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Office released a 64-page final investigative summary report of the killings. All six murder victims were students at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).

title: Mental health court
text: post-booking diversion system for mentally ill offenders. A program launched in Broward County, Florida was the first court, to be recognized and published as a specialized mental health court. Overseen by Judge Ginger Lerner-Wren, the Broward County Mental Health Court was launched in 1997, partially in response to a series of suicides of people with mental illness in the county jail. The Broward court and three other early mental health courts, Anchorage, AK, San Bernardino, CA, and King County, WA, were examined in a 2000 Bureau of Justice Assistance monograph, which was the first major study of this emerging judicial

title: Mental health court
text: criminal justice system, it creates a perversion in the system were a person's best bet for obtaining services is to get arrested. Because mental health courts are such a new phenomenon, there is little in the way of outcome data to determine their impact. Several studies of the Broward County court were released in 2002 and 2003 and found that participation in the court led to a greater connection to services. A 2004 study of the Santa Barbara County, California, Mental Health Court found that participants had reduced criminal activity during their participation. An evaluation of the Brooklyn Mental Health

title: Flint water crisis
text: Water Act, which prevents challenges to the law being ruled on in U.S. District Court and states they must be addressed by the Environmental Protection Agency, and the case should be re-filed in the Michigan Court of Claims. Also on February 2, a lawsuit was filed in Michigan Circuit Court on behalf of four Genesee County residents who contracted Legionnaires' disease during the Flint water crisis, including one woman who died seven days after entering the emergency room with a headache. The suit names McLaren Regional Medical Center and several Michigan DEQ officials as defendants. Lawyer Geoffrey Fieger represents the

title: Mental health court
text: decided to accept the name of the PAIR Program (PAIR stood for Psychiatric Assertive Identification and Referral). After, a couple years of lobbying the local authorities in Marion County, Indiana, the mental health court began as a formal program in 1996. Many consider this to be the nation's first mental health court in this second wave of mental health court initiatives. Since the PAIR Program did not operate with any new funds, there was not much scholarly research and therefore the accomplishments of Judge Goodman and the PAIR Program are frequently overlooked. The current PAIR Program is a comprehensive pretrial,

title: Richard T. Antoun
text: illness, schizoaffective disorder." Evidence was to include testimony from the defense's medical experts, Steven Simring and Charles Patrick Ewing. A competency hearing was held after mental health professionals concluded that al-Zahrani was mentally incompetent to understand his charge or be tried. On February 22, 2011, Broome County Judge Joseph F. Cawley Jr. ordered Al-Zahrani be placed in the custody of a state psychiatric facility for treatment, until he was deemed mentally competent to be tried. No new trial date was set, and the order was good for up to year. Al-Zahrani was to go on trial when deemed mentally competent.

title: O'Connor v. Donaldson
text: at Chattahoochee, due to needs of "care, maintenance, and treatment." He filed a lawsuit against the hospital and staff members claiming they had robbed him of his constitutional rights, by confining him against his will. Donaldson won his case (including monetary damages) in United States District Court, won the appeals, and in 1975 the victory was reaffirmed by the Supreme Court. A finding of "mental illness" alone cannot justify a State's locking a person up against his will and keeping him indefinitely in simple custodial confinement. Assuming that that term can be given a reasonably precise content and that the

title: California Department of Fair Employment and Housing
text: in Orange County Superior Court on behalf of two residents, and the administrative complaints filed on behalf of six additional residents, alleged the companies failed to accommodate tenants with mental health disabilities by taking steps to discourage tenants from keeping emotional support animals as a reasonable accommodation for their disabilities. The companies charged pet deposits and pet rent, imposed breed and size restrictions for legitimate support animals, and failed to engage in an interactive process to verify that tenants had genuine disabilities. The firms also lacked a uniform reasonable accommodation policy and failed to train their leasing professionals at their

title: Bryce Hospital
text: C. Rawlins, was one of the employees who had been laid off. Together they testified about intolerable conditions and improper treatments designed only to make the patients more manageable. In 1971 the plaintiff class was expanded to include patients at Alabama's two other inpatient mental health facilities, Searcy Hospital (Mt. Vernon) and Camp Partlow (Coker). The resulting court-ordered agreements formed the basis for federal minimum standards for the care of people with mental illness or mental retardations who reside in institutional settings. In 1999 a new settlement agreement was made, recognizing a great deal of progress. The case was finally