NJ Supreme Court Rules Non-Dangerous Criminally Insane Cannot be Detained
The New Jersey Supreme Court on this day ruled that criminally insane persons cannot be detained in mental institutions against their will if they have not been found to be dangerous to themselves or others.
The ruling declared unconstitutional a state law that allowed juries to acquit an accused murder by reason of insanity at the time of the crime and then determine whether the person’s condition of insanity was continuing. Persons who had not committed a crime and were then sent to mental institutions, by contrast, could only be confined as long as they displayed dangerousness. The judge in the case accepted the Public Defender’s argument that the differential treatment between the two groups violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
One June 26, 1975, in O’Connor v. Donaldson, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a state cannot confine a mentally ill person who is not a danger to the community and who can survive in the community by himself or herself or with the assistance of others.
Read Donaldson’s story: Kenneth Donaldson, Insanity Inside Out (1976)
Learn more: Monica A. Joseph, Discrimination Against the Mentally Ill (2016)
Learn more about the rights of the mentally ill at the World Health Organization: http://www.who.int/mental_health/policy/legislation/policy/en/