Word: patients
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...legal prowess, Yoder has endured nothing so extreme. But even though some of his fellow residents at the Chester hospital committed murders of breathtaking brutality, he has lived at the state's only maximum-security facility for the criminally insane more than twice as long as the average patient. His advocates say it was a suspicious chain of events that got Yoder committed in the first place, and there is evidence to support them. The tale of his arrival at Chester is long and winding, but it reveals some startling lapses in the legal system designed to protect people from...
...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...
...sailor man. Popeye's innocent charm somehow coexists with Chester's other landmarks, the Menard prison and the Chester Mental Health Center next door. Of the town's 8,400 residents, more than 3,000 are incarcerated. Some of the mental hospital's residents are quite disturbed: one patient was recently convicted of murder for slicing up his mother and two sisters...
...other papers followed. A columnist for the Natal Witness, South Africa's oldest newspaper, took up Yoder's cause. So did Dr. Patch Adams. Adams worked in the er at St. Elizabeths, a Washington mental hospital, during the '70s and '80s. Previously, in 1963, he was himself a patient at a psychiatric hospital for two weeks. He says he learned more from fellow patients than the distant doctors, and he felt a personal connection to Yoder's case. "I wasn't bullied by his intensity, as I think many are," he says...
...vulgar way, Yoder actually had a point. Although it is a large, federally funded organization designed to monitor institutions like Chester, Equip for Equality has never investigated the facility--even after it discovered those allegedly false reports. For years, some patients' advocates have complained that Chester provides inadequate care. Just in the past year, a state commission has substantiated charges that Chester has improperly confiscated patients' property, denied their privacy and failed to keep one patient from spreading his feces around a bathroom until Chester's human-rights committee got involved. "We've had longstanding, very serious concerns about Chester...