Word: ill
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...threatening correspondence--"I'll make sure there isn't enough of you left to identify," reads a typical letter to a judge--proves he is a dangerous man who will explode. But in Illinois, as in all other states, only dangerous people who are also deemed mentally ill can be involuntarily committed. That's why Illinois has hired its own big-ticket experts to evaluate Yoder and, presumably, testify against him. One, the forensic psychologist Reid Meloy, worked with prosecutors on the Timothy McVeigh trial. Meloy & Co. will lend outside heft to the government's position that Yoder suffers from...
...perhaps not unique. About 22,000 Americans are held against their will in state psychiatric hospitals. Since the 1960s, many of those institutions have closed, and hundreds of thousands of patients have been freed, some of them improvidently. Many ended up in jail; others are homeless. A few mentally ill people have committed homicides after being discharged, and those killings have won vast media coverage. In response, seven states have passed laws making it easier for authorities to force psychiatric treatment. Recently the nation tried to make sense of Andrea Yates, who drowned her children after years of ineffective schizophrenia...
Still, as a recent New York Times series revealed, institutions for the mentally ill don't always provide a safe environment. A Times reporter found that unskilled workers at private homes for the mentally ill in New York had neglected patients and coerced some into unneeded surgery. "Psychiatric survivors" from around the nation have formed a movement to publicize abuses against them, chiefly unnecessary drugging and involuntary electroshock...
Yoder didn't have a trial until the following month. Judge William Schuwerk Jr. heard the case. An ill-prepared public defender represented Yoder, and he allowed Vallabhaneni to assert without proof that Yoder had committed "several" assaults in prison. Schuwerk, who failed to mention that he himself had prosecuted Yoder's first commitment in 1982, ruled from the bench that Yoder should go to the asylum again...
...judges noted a series of government mistakes in the case and overturned the commitment order, which should have freed Yoder. But their ruling came too late: commitment orders expire after six months, and another judge had already signed a new one, based on the original evidence that Yoder was ill and dangerous, along with new charges that Yoder had been an irascible, uncooperative patient at Chester. Ironically, Stephen Hardy, the warden Yoder had beaten in court, had become the director of Chester in 1986. Yoder hasn't left the facility since he returned...