Court Opinion

ID: 9452081
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 17:29:57.413605+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:33:03.236054
License: Public Domain

BURGER, Circuit Judge, with whom DANAHER and TAMM, Circuit Judges, join
(dissenting).
We disagree with remanding the case to require the District Court to carry out an investigation of alternatives for which Appellant has never indicated any desire. The only issue before us is the legality of Mrs. Lake’s confinement in Saint Elizabeths Hospital and the only relief she herself has requested is immediate unconditional release.1 The majority does not intimate that Appellant’s present confinement as a patient at Saint Elizabeths Hospital is illegal,2 or that there is anything wrong with it except that she does not like it and wishes to get out of any confinement. Nevertheless, this Court now orders the District Court to perform functions normally reserved to social agencies by commanding search for a judicially approved course of treatment or custodial care for this mentally ill person who is plainly unable to care for herself. Neither this Court nor the District Court is equipped to carry out the broad geriatric inquiry proposed or to resolve the social and economic issues involved. This • is particularly illustrated in the first alternative the majority commands the District Court to explore:
whether the appellant and the public would be sufficiently protected if she were required to carry an identification card on her person so that the police or others could take her home if she should wander * * *.
The list of subjects to explore concludes with an admonition that “every effort should be made to find a course of treatment which appellant might be willing to accept.”
Although proceedings for commitment of mentally ill persons are not strictly adversary, a United States court in our legal system is not set up to initiate inquiries and direct studies of social welfare facilities or other social problems. This Court exists to decide questions put before it by parties to litigation on the basis of issues raised by them in pleadings and facts adduced by those parties. D.C.Code § 21-545 (Supp.1966) does not transmute the United States District Court for the District of Columbia into an administrative agency for proceedings involving the mentally ill. This statute provides only that “the court may order [a mentally ill person’s] * * * hospitalization for an indeterminate period, or order any other alternative course of treatment which the court believes will be in the best interests of the person or of the public.” (Emphasis added.) All this section does, or was intended to do, is authorize the court to order alternative courses of treatment, provided the evidence presented to it leads it to believe that some alternative is preferable to confinement in Saint Elizabeths Hospital. This appellant seeks only her release, not a transfer. We cannot find anything in this statute which even vaguely hints at a requirement that the court conduct broad inquiries into possible treatment facilities. In the absence of such language, we must interpret the statute as not enlarging the role of the court beyond its normal judicial function of deciding issues presented by the parties on the basis of such facts as the parties present.
Even if the statute were read to require the District Court or the Mental Health Commission to investigate alternatives during the commitment proceedings, clearly a petitioner in a- habeas corpus proceeding bears the initial burden of establishing the illegality of the present confinement. If, in order to accomplish this end, it is relevant to show that there are preferable alternatives to confinement in Saint Elizabeths, then the *664burden is on the petitioner to show the existence of these alternatives. Yet, from the filing of Mrs. Lake’s petition to the present moment, no one including the majority of this Court has demonstrated any alternative “course of treatment.”
What the majority has done here is first rewrite Mrs. Lake’s petition for her, to demand something which she has never requested, then it has proceeded to remand, ordering the District Court to consider this new “petition” written by this court. Mrs. Lake and her successive lawyers have never asked for exploration of alternatives; she requested total release. The majority orders the District Court to make “every effort * * * to find a course of treatment which appellant might be willing to accept” yet at the same time the majority flouts the petitioner’s wishes. What she wants this Court to do is to decide the legality of her commitment; however, the majority explicitly reserves that question pending the results of the study of District of Columbia social welfare facilities which it has ordered the Trial Court to undertake. We believe that this court should decide the issues raised by Appellant, not the issues it feels the Appellant should have raised. The Court’s failure to decide the issues raised leaves her confined in St. Elizabeths Hospital while the District Court conducts a study largely unrelated to the question of the legality of that confinement, and for which a court is not equipped.
To show that Appellant really does object to the place of her confinement, the majority is forced to rely on the response of her appointed counsel to a question from the bench at oral argument. Counsel said that Appellant’s major objection was that she was confined in a mental institution, and he intimated that possibly she might not be so unhappy with confinement in some other institution. This indicates that a large part of what troubles both Appellant and the majority is the fact that she is being confined in a mental institution and not some type of home for the aged which would provide essentially the same care but would not have attached to it the “onus” of being associated with a mental institution.
If Appellant were to receive precisely the same care she is presently receiving in the geriatrics ward of St. Elizabeths at an institution elsewhere with a name like Columbia Rest Haven, it does not appear that there would be much disagreement over the propriety of her confinement. However, a person’s freedom is no less arrested, nor is the effect on him significantly different, if he is confined in a rest home with a euphemistic name rather than at St. Elizabeths Hospital. The cases the majority cites to support the proposition that habeas corpus is available to challenge the place of custody all involved the quite different situation of challenges based on the nature rather than simply the name of the place of custody. Any conceivable relevance of those cases to the contentions made in the present case is eliminated by the fact that no one denies that Appellant is mentally ill.
We can all agree in principle that a series of graded institutions with various kinds of homes for the aged and infirm would be a happier solution to the problem than confining harmless senile ladies in St. Elizabeths Hospital with approximately 8000 patients, maintained at a great public expense. But it would be a piece of unmitigated folly to turn this appellant loose on the streets with or without an identity tag; and I am sure for my part that no District Judge will order such a solution. This city is hardly a safe place for able-bodied men, to say nothing of an infirm, senile, and disoriented woman to wander about with no protection except an identity tag advising police where to take her. The record shows that in her past wanderings she has been molested, and should she be allowed to wander again all of her problems might well be rendered moot either by natural causes or violence.

. The question of alternative treatment was never raised until this court requested counsel to discuss it in their briefs and arguments on rehearing en banc.

. Undisputed medical testimony was that Appellant “surely could not take care of herself in the community; * * * she needs supervision.’’