Patient dumped again

U.S. District Judge James C. Mahan has dismissed a lawsuit brought by one of the patients bused out of state by a Nevada state psychiatric hospital and abandoned in Sacramento, a city where he was unknown.

James F. C. Brown was the focus of an investigative report last year by the Sacramento Bee that revealed Nevada's dumping program that resulted in 1,500 patients being sent out of state with one-way tickets over a period of five years. After the Bee exposé, Brown was reunited with his daughter.

The class action lawsuit was filed for Brown “and for all persons similarly situated” on June 11 last year by Allen Lichtenstein and Staci Pratt of the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada. The suit targeted both Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital and Southern Nevada Adult Mental Health Services. It charged that Brown and other patients “were medicated before their discharge and required to leave the facility under the influence of powerful anti-psychotic/tranquilizing medication. While Plaintiffs were in a drugged state, and incompetent to give informed consent, the standard procedure was for institution staff to physically escort Plaintiffs from the facility and place them in taxis bound for the Greyhound Bus Station in Las Vegas, Nevada. They were directed and required to travel on pre-paid tickets which had been previously ordered and paid for by Defendants.”

But Mahan found the dumping was a proper response by a state agency to scarce resources, and that Brown was not coercively dumped.

“The coercive power of the state was not imposed on him,” he wrote. “There was no direct command from an individual bearing state coercive authority, nor threat of punishment if he did not travel to Sacramento.”