Court Opinion

ID: 9487591
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 12:21:25.796207+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:52:22.704359
License: Public Domain

BOYCE F. MARTIN, Jr., Circuit Judge, dissenting.
I join with Judge Merritt in dissent and write separately to add a point of my own. This is a case where Congress and we as citizens are missing the boat. We have today sent a rather ill citizen to the federal penitentiary for fifteen years at an expense in excess of a million taxpayer dollars when in fact he should be hospitalized in a state facility, which obviously the state of Ohio does not have available. In our rush to answer the cry that crime is everywhere, we have again neglected our duty to mentally ill or emotionally disturbed citizens who commit crimes. We have again used expediency over good judgment by incarcerating such citizens in a federal penitentiary with prisoners who possess their full faculties. In no way do I believe that Robert Paul Kaplansky has lived a life of exemplary behavior. I do, however, believe from reading this record that Robert Paul Kaplansky suffers from mental and emotional problems that are better treated through hospitalization or medication. As evidenced by the opinion of Kaplansky’s treating psychologist, Dr. DiFranco, Kaplan-sky will in all likelihood serve his fifteen years at taxpayers’ expense, now approaching $25,000 per year and rising, only to return to the same behavior which is caused by his mental disorder. I cannot imagine Con*331-359gress intended such a wasteful result as that required by the majority’s decision today when it enacted Section 924(e). If Congress intended this result, it should have determined that facilities be constructed so that persons like Robert Paul Kaplansky could at least be given an opportunity for reasonable medical assistance, thereby avoiding the tragic circumstances that present him to us as a three-time convicted felon.
I therefore dissent.