The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is being asked to help a man who was handcuffed by police and locked up in a mental-health facility for five days for being ill – not with a mental illness, but with a chronic disease similar to multiple sclerosis.
It leaves Gordon Goines, 37, with sometimes slurred speech and occasionally an unsteady walk.
There’s no “mental” condition involved.
The request is coming from the Rutherford Institute, which has filed an appeal of a lower court’s dismissal of a lawsuit filed on behalf of Goines.
The organization is challenging a U.S. District Court dismissal of the Fourth Amendment lawsuit filed against the Valley Community Services Board, one of its mental health screeners and three police officers in Waynesboro, Virginia.
Specifically, Institute attorneys say the lower court was wrong when it said Virginia police did not clearly violate the law in seizing Goines and that the screener’s conclusion that Goines could be held as mentally ill was presumptively correct because it was accepted by the magistrate who ordered his detention.
In fact, the appeal argues, the defendants violated clearly established law protecting citizens from unjustified mental health seizures.
“By giving government officials the power to declare individuals mentally ill and detain them against their will without first ensuring that they are actually trained to identify such illness, the government has opened the door to a system in which involuntary detentions can be used to make people disappear,” said John W. Whitehead, Rutherford’s chief.
“Indeed, government officials in the Cold War-era Soviet Union often used psychiatric hospitals as prisons in order to isolate political prisoners from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally.”
WND reported earlier Goines’ affliction is cerebellar ataxia, and as a result he “has difficulty at times with his balance, causing him to walk unsteadily, speaks slowly and with a slur and has problems with fine motor skills.”
But he has no cognitive impairment and is of above-average intelligence, the report from Rutherford noted.
Police officers “wrongfully arrested, strip searched, handcuffed to a table” Goines. Then he was locked up for five days in a mental health hospital against his will – and with no access to family and friends, Rutherford reported.
The Fourth Amendment lawsuit explained that it was on May 15, 2014, when Goines had difficulty with his cable service. He called the company, and a technician told him a neighbor had spliced into his service, suggesting Goines call police.
He walked across the street to the Waynesboro Police Department to report the theft, and one responding officer said Goines was having “mental-health issues.”
The officers asked him if he wanted to talk to someone, and Goines, thinking they meant about the cable theft, agreed.
Instead of addressing the theft, the officers handcuffed him and took him to the Augusta County Medical Center, where he was interviewed by a screener who was not a licensed medical professional, clinical psychologist or social worker.
He then was taken to the Crossroads Mental Health Center, where he was held until a later hearing found he had no mental illness.
