Opinion ID: 284813
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: Effect of Our Holding

Text: 58 Most judicial reform is accompanied by cries of horror and dismay that the action by the court has surely carried society over the brink and into the abyss of administrative chaos. Certainly this was true of Baxstrom. When § 384 was invalidated, the New York authorities decided to transfer all patients confined in Dannemora or Matteawan pursuant to that provision — a total of 992 inmates — to civil hospitals. This transfer was designated by them as Operation Baxstrom. 12 When this decision was announced, some segments of the community were anxious and outraged. Involved labor unions demanded special pay and training for working with the Operation Baxstrom transferees because they were presumptively dangerous. Residents in the neighborhoods of civil mental hospitals protested the presence of criminal lunatics in their midst. Yet in only one year the protests evaporated. The transfer has been an astounding success. Of these nearly 1000 ex-prisoners whom the appropriate state authorities had prior to Baxstrom determined to be too dangerous to be placed in a civil hospital, 176 have been fully discharged — 147 to their home communities and the rest to other hospitals; 454 others have elected to remain in civil mental hospitals on voluntary or informal status; and only seven have had to be returned to Matteawan after a judicial determination that they were dangerous. As one author has noted, the Baxstrom patients were almost as pure as Ivory Snow; they were 99 28/100 per cent free from dangerous mental illness. See Morris, supra, at 672. 59 What could explain this massive misplacement of people in Matteawan and Dannemora — places which are more restrictive prisons than hospitals? The New York Bar Report indicated it was another instance of institutionalized expectations putting blinders on our perceptions. N.Y. Bar Report at 227. The very fact that these men were in Dannemora may have induced the circular reasoning which impelled the New York authorities to the conclusion that they were dangerous. Perhaps independent judicial examination of patients in Dannemora pursuant to the guidelines laid down in § 73 may contribute to an atmosphere permitting clearer vision. At the very least, the results of Operation Baxstrom indicate that it is not unlikely that a significant number of the patients committed to Dannemora under § 383 — particularly those committed under the pre-1962 law like Schuster — may not be so mentally ill as to require denying them the freedom of a regular prison. 60 In any event, we do not believe our decision today even though it requires inter alia periodic review of the need to continue prisoners in institutions for the criminally insane will open the proverbial floodgates and unduly burden the courts with frivolous cases. We cannot safely predict that every prisoner-patient will demand the review we here make available. For example, 454 of the patients transferred to civil hospitals in Operation Baxstrom, nearly half the total number, chose to remain hospitalized on a voluntary basis even though they could have contested the validity of their commitment in court by jury trial. N.Y. Bar Report n. 32 at 26. Also, a six-year study of civil commitment procedures by the American Bar Foundation confirms this premise. Its authors state: In practice this right [to the jury trial in civil commitment proceedings] is seldom invoked, either in California or in those other jurisdictions included in this study. So infrequent are they that over the several months occupied in the study of Los Angeles we were able to observe only two jury trials. Rock, et al., Hospitalization and Discharge of the Mentally Ill, at 102 (1968). 61 But even in the unlikely event that every prisoner in a Department of Correction mental hospital does demand the full panoply of procedures to which he is entitled, the total number of such prisoners under sentence at one time is so small compared to the number of involuntarily committed civilians in state mental hospitals that the effect on the administrative and judicial systems would be minimal. N.Y. Bar Report at 26. On April 1, 1964, there were 85,279 resident patients in the civil state hospitals. At the same time there were fewer than 2,971 patients of all classes in both Matteawan and Dannemora combined. State of N. Y., Dept. of Mental Hygiene, Office Directory of State and Licensed Mental Institutions 176 (1965) as quoted in N.Y. Bar Report at 26. 13 Moreover, The Department of Mental Hygiene has provided us with statistics which indicate that during the fiscal year ending March 31, 1968, 25,439 persons were involuntarily admitted to state civil mental hospitals, while 152 persons were admitted to Dannemora and 255 to Matteawan. Further, the New York Court of Appeals summarily dismissed the argument that its courts would be burdened when that court ordered jury trials for all criminals committed for treatment of narcotics addiction. People v. Fuller, supra, 24 N.Y.2d 292, 300 N.Y.S.2d 102, 248 N.E.2d 17. And it is a fair assumption that the number of addicts involved far exceeds the number of prisoners committed under § 383. We thus add but a trickle of water to an ocean. When measured against the possibility that persons committed as summarily as Schuster were wrongly subjected to the horrors of a prison for the insane, any inconvenience is so small by comparison that we cannot ignore our obligation to re-examine their cases. If we open any floodgate today, which we doubt, it is only to provide a flood of long-overdue relief.