Court Opinion

ID: 9477292
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 06:19:23.956858+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:45:47.898925
License: Public Domain

HILL, Circuit Judge,
concurring in Judge TJOFLAT’s dissenting opinion:
I concur in Judge Tjoflat’s dissenting opinion.
Just over a half century ago — in 1936— retaliation like Mr. Burch’s suit was ridiculed by the then President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt. In his first reelection campaign that year he spoke in Chicago. He observed that business and commerce had suffered during the depression and he claimed that his New Deal and other recovery policies had been therapeutic for those interests. Noting that what he termed “big business” opposed his reelection, Roosevelt likened that opposition to a patient’s throwing his crutches at his doctor.1
*818Mr. Burch is like that. He seems to have forgotten how sick he was (“hallucinating, confused, disoriented, and clearly psychotic”) when the good Samaritan2 took him to Apalachee Community Mental Health Service. He is now recovered3 and he seeks our imprimatur upon his suit against the providers of his therapy. I was but an impressionable lad when I heard FDR’s figure of speech. I carried an image of a patient flailing away at his doctor with his crutch. I had not, until now, personally encountered a living embodiment of the metaphor!
That is not to say that I should not find a constitutionally based claim for a state’s misusing its psychiatric hospitals, asylums, or other facilities as a matter of state policy. I do not ignore reliable reports of such practices in other, totalitarian, nations. There, as a matter of established state procedure, dissidents, politically undesirables and other mentally competent people are said to be “diagnosed” as mental defectives and locked away in purported mental health facilities. I am here, though, raising a straw man for striking. It is not alleged — it is not even hinted — that the state of Florida has adopted a state policy of wrongfully confining competent people in its mental institutions.
It clearly appears that the “established state procedure” of Florida is quite equal to the demands of our Constitution. Perhaps Florida should have anticipated that those schooled in mental health care instead of law might stumble into random, unauthorized errors in their attempts to comply with the state mandated procedures. That may be why the state provides for state court, state law, tort recoveries for violations of its mental health act. Fla.Stat. § 394.459(13) (1981).

. Frank Kingdon in his book As FDR Said (Duell, Sloan & Pearce) quotes Roosevelt’s Chicago address:
"Some of these people really forget how sick they were. But I know how sick they were. I have their fever charts. I know how the knees of our rugged individualists were trembling four years ago and how their hearts fluttered. They came to Washington in great numbers. Washington did not look like a dangerous bureaucracy to them then. Oh nol It looked like an emergency hospital. All of the distinguished patients wanted two things —a quick hypodermic to end the pain and a course of treatment to cure the disease. They wanted them in a hurry; we gave them both. And now most of the patients seem to be doing very nicely. Some of them are even well enough to throw their crutches at the doctor."

. The good Samaritan is, presumably, subject to suit for wrongful arrest or kidnapping. Burch was not, apparently, competent to consent to being carried to the mental health facility. Burch appears to be highly sensitive to'being handled by those who have only his revocable consent.

. Burch’s recovery appears from the fact that he sues on his own behalf and not through next friend or guardian ad litem. His lawyers have accepted him as a client and subjected him to litigation, presumably upon the basis of his consent.