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Subject: FW: AP on Olmstead: Court Takes Up Disabled Care Suit
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Subject: AP on Olmstead: Court Takes Up Disabled Care Suit
Court Takes Up Disabled Care Suit [Summary]
WASHINGTON (AP) --Supreme Court justices worried aloud Wednesday that
mentally disabled people might be "abandoned on the streets" if an
anti-bias law is judged to give them a broad right to live in homelike
settings rather than state hospitals.
Source: AP Online
Date: 21-Apr-1999 17:12
Author(s): RICHARD CARELLI, Associated Press Writer
Court Takes Up Disabled Care Suit
Story Filed: Wednesday, April 21, 1999 5:12 PM EDT
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Supreme Court justices worried aloud Wednesday that
mentally disabled people might be "abandoned on the streets" if an
anti-bias law is judged to give them a broad right to live in homelike
settings rather than state hospitals.
"What bothers me is writing something which, as it works out in the real
world, leaves many who need to be in institutions out, abandoned on the
streets," Justice Stephen G. Breyer said as the court considered a Georgia
case that could yield the decade's most important ruling on treatment for
the mentally disabled.
Questions and comments from Justices John Paul Stevens and Sandra Day
O'Connor suggested similar concerns, and Justice David H. Souter appeared
most hostile to Georgia's side of the case, but the hour-long argument
session gave no clear indication how the nine-member court will rule.
The court is to decide by late June whether the Americans with Disabilities
Act and a related regulation require community placement of the mentally
disabled whenever appropriate.
Ruling on a lawsuit by two Georgia women, lower courts said such placement
is required unless living up to the 1990 federal law would fundamentally
change a state's services to the mentally disabled.
Nationwide, about 70,000 mentally disabled people are in state hospitals.
A 1991 federal regulation requires services provided by state and local
governments to be delivered "in the most integrated setting appropriate to
the needs" of disabled persons, and O'Connor suggested defining that phrase
is at the heart of the case.
"Is that what it boils down to?" she asked. Georgia Senior Assistant
Attorney General Patricia Downing responded, "Yes."
"It cannot be assumed that because one option is appropriate another is
not," Downing said in contending that states are free to choose between
treatment in community settings and hospitals. She said hospital treatment
may be preferred for policy, medical or financial reasons.
But Michael Gottesman, a Georgetown University law professor representing
the two women, called their "isolation and segregation from the societal
mainstream of American life" a violation of the federal ban on
discrimination.
Elaine Wilson and Lois Curtis sued Georgia to get out of a state mental
hospital. They had been approved for community-based care but faced long
waiting lists. Now in group homes, both women were in the audience that
packed the courtroom Wednesday.
Souter suggested that treating people able to live outside a mental
hospital the same as those who cannot is a form of discrimination. When he
asked Downing whether his suggestion was unreasonable, she answered,
"Respectfully, I believe it is."
Clearly sympathetic to the state was Justice Antonin Scalia. "Is Georgia
required to have community placements?" he asked Downing, and appeared
satisfied when she responded, "No, this law doesn't require it."
At times, the justices hurled successive hypothetical questions more
rapidly than they could be answered, leading Chief Justice William H.
Rehnquist to read for his colleagues just what the court had agreed to
decide.
Justice Department lawyer Irving Gornstein, representing the Clinton
administration, joined Gottesman in pressing for a more expansive view of
the law.
Numerous advocacy groups for the mentally disabled, the American
Psychiatric Association, American Civil Liberties Union and 58 former state
officials with leadership roles in mental health treatment are lined up as
friends of the court opposing Georgia.
The National Conference of State Legislatures and seven individual states
are among those siding with Georgia: Colorado, Hawaii, Montana, Nevada,
Tennessee, Texas and Wyoming.
Copyright (c) 1999 Associated Press Information Services, all rights
reserved.
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