Filed Date: March 19, 2002
Case Ongoing
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This lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon on March 19, 2002, by the Oregon Advocacy Center (“OAC”), representing criminal patients unable to stand trial due to mental illness; the Metropolitan Public Defender Services, Inc. (“MPD”); and a criminal patient who waited 23 days after being found unfit to stand trial before admittance to a proper mental health treatment facility. The plaintiffs sued the Oregon Department of Human Services (“DHS”) under the Protection and Advocacy for Individuals with Mental Illness (“PAIMI”) Act, 42 U.S.C. § 10805. The plaintiffs were represented by Disabilities Rights Oregon, the Protection & Advocacy organization for the state of Oregon. The complaint for this case is not available in electronic form, but according to the Findings of Fact & Conclusion of Law by District Court Judge Owen M. Panner, the plaintiffs sought declaratory and permanent injunctive relief along with attorneys’ fees and costs. 2002 WL 35578910 (D. Or. 2002).
The plaintiffs claimed that the defendants violated Oregon criminal patients’ Due Process constitutional rights by failing to promptly transfer these individuals to an appropriate state mental health hospital, leaving them in various county jails without proper treatment. On March 25, 2002, Oregon State Hospital (“OSH”) had a list of 11 criminal patients unable to stand trial, who were awaiting transport to a facility. Plaintiffs claim that the county jails in which these criminal patients were residing while awaiting transfer were unequipped to handle these types of patients. They claimed that these jails were “rudimentary”, “lack[ed] people who [were] trained to care for mentally ill people”, while one in particular was described as having “virtually no mental health treatment” at all. According to the plaintiffs, the wait time for these individuals was unacceptable, and the criminal patient population had a high suicide risk and that psychosis can be an emergency requiring immediate treatment; therefore, prompt transfer to a proper mental health facility that can help deal with these situations would be critical. 2002 WL 35578910 (D. Or. 2002).
On March 19, 2002, the plaintiffs sought a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction. This motion was denied by Judge Panner on March 25, 2002. On March 29, 2002, the defendants filed a motion for protective order, but it was denied by Judge Panner on the same day.
On May 10, 2002, Judge Panner entered a Findings of Fact & Conclusion of Law. 2002 WL 35578910 (D. Or. 2002). The district court found all individuals have a right to be free from incarceration, absent a criminal conviction. Specifically, the court found that it was the state’s interest to assist restoring competency to criminal patients, not to punish them. The court stated that while Oregon county jails did not have the capacity to provide adequate mental health treatment tailored to rehabilitate or restore competency, OSH does. The court recognized that persons found unable to stand trial, yet remain incarcerated, were entitled to prompt treatment in a rehabilitative facility, as even short periods of incarceration could cause extreme harm. The court held that the defendants violated the due process rights of the criminal patients unfit to stand trial. Accordingly, the court ordered that all admissions of these individuals to a state hospital be done in a reasonably timely manner no more than seven days after an order determining a criminal defendant to be unable to stand trial due to mental incapacities. The court retained jurisdiction to enforce the order. 2002 WL 35578910 (D. Or. 2002).
On May 14, 2002, the defendants filed a notice of appeal from the Findings of Fact & Conclusion of Law and filed a motion to stay judgment pending appeal. The next day Judge Panner entered a judgment for the plaintiffs, while also retaining jurisdiction to enforce the injunction. 2002 WL 35578888 (D. Or. 2002). On May 27, 2002, Judge Panner denied the defendants’ May 14 motion to stay, concluding that the defendants failed to show a strong showing that their appeal was likely to succeed. Judge Panner was eventually proven correct on this conclusion, as on March 6, 2003, Ninth Circuit of The United States Court of Appeals affirmed District Court Judge Panner’s judgment in an opinion by Circuit Judge Raymond C. Fisher. 322 F.3d 1101 (9th Cir. 2003). The Court of Appeals concluded that OAC had standing to bring the suit, and upheld the district court’s injunction.
The plaintiffs filed a motion for attorneys’ fees on May 15, 2002, which Judge Panner granted on May 29 of that same year. The plaintiffs were awarded $53,062.50 in attorneys’ fees and $600.86 in costs. On July 30, 2003, the 9th Circuit Court awarded plaintiffs an additional $31,252.50 in attorneys’ fees to cover the appeal.
On May 19, 2019, litigation suddenly resumed. The plaintiffs filed a motion for a finding of contempt because the defendants admitted, in sworn testimony, that they had been violating the injunction since October 2018. Rather than transporting patients to OSH within seven days, the defendants, MPD attorneys reported, had taken approximately one month to transport recent clients. The case was reassigned from Judge Owen M. Panner to Judge Michael W. Mosman because Judge Panner passed away in 2018. On June 12, 2019, Judge Mosman denied the motion for a finding of contempt but scheduled a compliance hearing. The plaintiffs appealed the decision to the Ninth Circuit, but the appeal was dismissed voluntarily on September 5, 2019.
On August 23, 2019, the plaintiffs requested modification of the injunction and a declaratory judgment that they were the prevailing party––for the purposes of attorneys’ fees––because the defendants resumed compliance with the injunction following the motion for contempt. On October 28, 2019, Judge Mosman denied the plaintiffs’ request for declaratory judgment, reasoning that, since the injunction did not provide for monitoring, the monitoring work done by DRO and MPD was not compensable. Additionally, Judge Mosman concluded that there was not sufficient proof that plaintiff’s motion for contempt spurred the defendant to return to compliance because OSH had been sporadically complying with the injunction between 2018 and 2019 and had been working on its compliance issues before the plaintiffs’ motion. Judge Mosman also declined to modify the injunction to require monitoring by the plaintiff because defendants’ noncompliance was not a “significant change,” and there was no evidence that the new legislation creating a diversion program had slowed down admission at OSH.
On April 17, 2020, the defendants filed a motion to modify the injunction because OSH could not safely comply with the injunction due to COVID-19. The defendants requested to temporarily limit admissions until “it is medically safe for OSH to begin accepting patients in the normal course again” and be able to admit small groups of patients onto specialized admissions units with the ability to quarantine new admissions. On May 13, 2020, Judge Mosman granted defendants’ proposed modification of the injunction. The defendant was required to submit progress reports to the court and the plaintiffs with updates on progress towards eliminating the backlog of patients and not have a quarantine period longer than 14 days. On June 12, 2020, plaintiffs appealed the modification of the injunction to the Ninth Circuit.
Defendants submitted regular progress reports per the modification of the injunction. On December 1, 2020, the defendants made an emergency request to suspend admission temporarily due to COVID-19. The court granted the order to suspend admission on December 2, 2020, and continued the grant extensions to the suspension until May 31, 2021. On May 17, 2021, Judge Mosman directed the parties to engage in a settlement conference.
On August 16, 2021, the Ninth Circuit vacated and remanded the district court’s modification of the injunction in an unpublished decision. The Ninth Circuit held that the lower court abused its discretion by not tailoring its order to the factual circumstances because it modified the mandatory seven-day deadline without “imposing meaningful parameters to ensure that the interests of those patients are served to the greatest extent possible.” The district court could have instead adopted a sunset date for the new admissions period or proposed a timeline other than seven days. Even though the lower court was facing the unprecedented circumstances of the pandemic, the Ninth Circuit concluded that an open-ended modification of the injunction was “inconsistent with the urgent need to transfer individuals…out of jails.” 2021 WL 3615536.
In light of the Ninth Circuit’s decision, the plaintiffs filed for a permanent injunction in the district court on August 18, 2021. On September 22, 2021, Judge Mosman denied the plaintiffs’ motion for a permanent injunction and instead modified the injunction. Judge Mosman ordered the defendants to submit progress reports to the court and the plaintiffs every three weeks with the admissions records and wait times for plaintiffs and submit weekly reports to plaintiff’s counsel with the admission list, a list of patients referred for admission, and whether OSH anticipated pausing admissions in the next two weeks. The order was set to expire December 3, 2021.
On October 19, 2021, the Ninth Circuit reversed the district court’s 2019 denial of attorneys’ fees. The plaintiffs were awarded the amount calculated in their motion minus the amount billed for settlement talks, which equaled $43,545.
On December 10, 2021, the parties came to an interim agreement to appoint a neutral expert, Dr. Debra Pinals, and to consolidate this case with Bowman v. Matteucci (3:21-cv-01637), which was a case about mental health admissions. The purpose of the expert was to propose a short-term compliance plan and a global admissions protocol. Dr. Pinals submitted reports on January 30 and June 5, 2022. In those reports, Dr. Pinals recommended three actions to fix the admittance crisis at OSH. First, that the plaintiffs seek to limit patients who can be admitted to OSH to only those who need expedited admission. Second, that the plaintiffs ask for a decreased period of commitment at OSH on a sliding scale of 90 days to one year based on the seriousness of the crime that the patient was charged with. Third, that OSH must discharge the approximately 100 patients who had been committed for longer than the new maximum.
On August 16, 2022, Judge Mosman granted in part and denied in part plaintiffs’ request to implement Dr. Pinals’s recommendations. Judge Mosman granted plaintiffs’ request to implement Dr. Pinals’s report more broadly, but he denied the implementation of the specific solutions discussed above because they violated state law. This was because all civilly committed patients, not just those on expedited requests, had a right to be admitted to OSH and the commitment could last up to three years.
On September 1, 2022, Judge Mosman modified the court’s adoption of the neutral expert’s report. Judge Mosman found that defendants were not in compliance with the permanent injunction, and ordered the defendants to comply with the full recommendations in Dr. Pinals’s report. If not terminated by the neutral expert, the injunction is currently scheduled to expire September 1, 2023.
On September 28, 2022, Legacy Emanuel Hospital & Health Center, Providence Health & Services - Oregon, Legacy Health Systems, and PeaceHealth filed a motion to intervene, which was granted on October 13, 2022. Judge Mosman also further consolidated the case with Legacy Health System et al v. Allen (6:22-cv-01460-MO), which was a case about whether forcing acute care hospitals to civilly commit patients that OSH had a statutory duty to admit violated the patients’ Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment rights.
The intervenors filed a motion to modify or dissolve the injunction by arguing for a less intrusive alternative. On January 9, 2023, Judge Mosman denied the intervenors’ motion to modify or dissolve the injunction. First, the intervenors argued that the court should wait for the backlog caused by the pandemic to work its way through the system, but the court held that the admissions pauses took place too long ago and should have cleared the system, so the state needed the shorter discharge times. Second, the intervenors argued for increasing capacity by opening another facility, contracting with private providers, and increasing staff, but the court held that OSH had already taken many of these measures and it would be intrusive on the state’s policy making powers. Third, the intervenors proposed to tweak OSH’s admissions and discharge policies, but these changes were all addressed by the neutral expert. The intervenors also argued that returning patients to their communities too early would cause them to decompensate, which would directly affect the intervenors because they would have to admit the patients for civil commitments and it would cause additional constitutional violations. The intervenors wanted to change expedited admissions criteria for civil commitments and discharge criteria, but Judge Mosman held that the neutral expert’s recommendations had remedied these concerns. Overall, since the state acquiesced to the neutral expert by acknowledging that they could not solve the crisis, the court upheld the injunction to defer to OSH’s policy decision to change its policies in line with the neutral report, instead of forcing OSH to defer to the intervenors.
On December 22, 2022, defendants filed a motion to dismiss, and litigation is ongoing on that motion.
Summary Authors
Matt Ramirez (6/16/2016)
Sean Drohan (6/16/2021)
Sophia Weaver (3/10/2023)
For PACER's information on parties and their attorneys, see: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4366402/parties/oregon-advocacy-center-v-mink/
Boyer, David (Oregon)
Baker, Victoria (Oregon)
Conbere, Jill (Oregon)
Boenisch, Christian F. (Oregon)
Carr, Thomas A. (Oregon)
See docket on RECAP: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4366402/oregon-advocacy-center-v-mink/
Last updated Dec. 17, 2024, 6:54 p.m.
State / Territory: Oregon
Case Type(s):
Key Dates
Filing Date: March 19, 2002
Case Ongoing: Yes
Plaintiffs
Plaintiff Description:
Oregon Advocacy Center, a non-profit representing people with mental illness, specifically those found unable to stand trial, the Metropolitan Public Defender Services, Inc., a non-profit representing indigent criminal defendants, and a criminal patient who waited 23 days before admittance to a proper mental health treatment facility.
Plaintiff Type(s):
Non-profit NON-religious organization
Attorney Organizations:
NDRN/Protection & Advocacy Organizations
Public Interest Lawyer: Yes
Filed Pro Se: No
Class Action Sought: No
Class Action Outcome: Not sought
Defendants
Oregon Department of Human Services, State
Defendant Type(s):
Facility Type(s):
Case Details
Causes of Action:
Protection and Advocacy for Individuals with Mental Illness (PAIMI) Act, 42 U.S.C. § 10801
Constitutional Clause(s):
Available Documents:
Injunctive (or Injunctive-like) Relief
Outcome
Prevailing Party: Plaintiff
Nature of Relief:
Injunction / Injunctive-like Settlement
Source of Relief:
Content of Injunction:
Implement complaint/dispute resolution process
Goals (e.g., for hiring, admissions)
Amount Defendant Pays: $128,460.86
Order Duration: 2002 - None
Issues
General/Misc.:
Disability and Disability Rights:
Jails, Prisons, Detention Centers, and Other Institutions:
Placement in mental health facilities
Medical/Mental Health Care: