King v. Greenblatt
| Decision Date | 21 June 1999 |
| Docket Number | No. Civ.A. 72-571-ADM.,No. Civ.A. 72-788-ADM.,Civ.A. 72-788-ADM.,Civ.A. 72-571-ADM. |
| Citation | 53 F.Supp.2d 117 |
| Parties | Mitchell G. KING, et al., Plaintiffs, Donald Pearson, et al., Intervenor Plaintiffs, v. Milton GREENBLATT, M.D., et al., Defendants. Harold G. Williams, et al., Plaintiffs, Sherman Miller, et al., Intervenor Plaintiffs, v. Michael Lesiak, et al., Defendants. |
| Court | U.S. District Court — District of Massachusetts |
Peter F. Russell, Onset, MA, for Mitchell G. King, plaintiff.
Robert D. Keefe, Hale & Dorr, Boston, MA, for Class of 48 + 1, Harold Williams, James M. Kater, Thomas Minervino, plaintiffs.
David R. Geiger, Jeffrey S. Follett, Foley, Hoag & Eliot, Boston, MA, for Donald Pearson, Albert Gagne, Joseph Johnson, Lynwode Paquette, Calvin Tate, intervenor-plaintiff.
David R. Geiger, Jeffrey S. Follett, (See above), for Lynwode Paquette, intervenor-plaintiff.
Jeffrey S. Follett, Follett, Foley, Hoag & Eliot, Boston, MA, for Michael Kelley, Francis O'Connor, intervenor-plaintiff.
Judith S. Yogman, Attorney General's Office, Boston, MA, William L. Pardee, for Leslie Taylor, Correctional, Charles W. Gaughan, defendant.
Judith S. Yogman, Attorney General's Office, Boston, MA, for Milton Greenblatt, defendant.
Ronald J. DeWolfe, Bridgewater, MA, pro se.
Larry Davis, Bridgewater, MA, pro se.
Dennis J. Quintal, Sr., Bridgewater, MA, pro se.
Robert E. Cameron, Bridgewater, MA, pro se.
Peter T. Wechsler, John R. Hitt, Attorney General's Office, Boston, MA, for John F. White, interested party.
These two cases involve a resident population of civilly-committed sexually dangerous persons at the Massachusetts Treatment Center for Sexually Dangerous Persons in Bridgewater, Massachusetts (the "Treatment Center"). They enter their final stage on the defendants' renewed motion to vacate or terminate long-standing consent decrees which were put in place approximately twenty-five years ago to govern operations at the facility. The road to this point has been long and uneven. The twenty-seven years of litigation along the route has been exhaustively described in prior orders of this Court and the Court of Appeals, but a brief overall review may be a helpful backdrop to this memorandum.1
The Massachusetts Sexually Dangerous Person Law was passed in 1947, Statute 1947, c. 683, and is found at Mass.Gen. Laws ch. 123A § 1 et seq. It was premised on the assumption that sex offending was caused by severe mental illness which could be cured if the offender was given a day to life commitment at a psychiatric institution to participate in an intensive treatment regimen.2 The statute was amended in 1954 to provide for the establishment of a such a facility. The Treatment Center subsequently opened in 1957 to serve this population.
In 1972, residents at the Treatment Center filed complaints alleging that the conditions of confinement and the inadequacy of treatment programs, work opportunities, and avocational and educational activities, violated the fifth, eighth, and fourteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution.3 In 1974, the district court entered two consent decrees in King (the "Original" decree, and one week later, the "Supplemental" decree) and one consent decree in Williams. (It also issued a partial consent decree in 1975 which elaborated on one provision of the Williams decree.) The consent decrees have raised a variety of issues and have led to a stream of litigation over the course of their twenty-five year history.
In order to fully evaluate the impact of this litigation, it is important to understand the basis on which these cases were brought and the issues that confronted Judge Wyzanski at the time these decrees were entered. While the later years of litigation tended to focus on specific issues raised in King and Williams, such as inadequacy of treatment and unfair denial of privileges, the full record before Judge Wyzanski went far beyond the claims in those cases. At the time the consent decrees were entered, conditions at the Treatment Center were deplorable.4 Residents lived in cramped, poorly furnished cells which were built in 1895. Their water supply came from the highly polluted and inadequately treated Taunton River. At various times in 1972, 1973, and 1974, the bacterial level of the river water after chlorination failed to meet safe drinking water standards. Even the portable water supply from wells was exposed to danger of pollution from a nearby dump. Moreover, it was continually interrupted due to the Center's antiquated plumbing system which dated back to 1888. The Center's sewerage system was similarly outmoded and sub-standard, having had no work done on it since 1934. The cells were without toilets or sinks. Instead, residents were forced to keep small chamber pots in their cells in which to defecate and urinate. Every morning residents lined up and carried their human waste to empty into a service sink at the end of their floor. The service sink was located within a few feet of a large cast iron trough used for washing. Washing and shaving took place in open view of urinating and defecating activities. The shower facility was located outside the housing unit, across an outdoor courtyard. Thus, residents seeking to shower were forced to walk outside, even during the cold winter months. Heating and ventilation equipment was obsolete, and some cells were without heat for periods of several days. There was only one licensed doctor at the Treatment Center and no nurses. Medication was handed out by correctional officers. There was no library, no educational programs, no gymnasium, no outdoor recreation area, and no work-release or community access program. Vocational facilities were very limited. Nor was there any tier-system of security. Instead, all residents were housed under maximum security conditions. Movement was restricted as correctional officers on patrol did not carry cell keys. All keys were kept in one location and each cell had to be opened individually. These were the conditions that existed at the time of the consent decrees. They are representative of the circumstances that the consent decrees aimed to correct.
The first five provisions of the Original King and Williams consent decrees contained parallel language which provided that the Treatment Center would be treated as a Department of Mental Health ("DMH") facility. DMH was granted primary authority over residents and treatment, while the Department of Corrections ("DOC") was given responsibility for custodial personnel.5 Residents were entitled to "the least restrictive conditions necessary to achieve the purpose of commitment." Both DMH and DOC would "take steps jointly" to "improve physical conditions," "implement a meaningful work program," and have "a system of differing security for different categories of patients ... to permit less restrictive conditions for those patients not requiring maximum security." The Supplemental Decree addressed King's specific complaint over his placement in the segregation unit. It prohibited the use of solitary confinement "for the purpose of discipline or punishment" and required that any sequestering conform with the "minimum standards of due process" and "human decency." The Williams Decree further ordered the defendants to submit a plan to offer therapeutic, educational, vocational, and avocational programs at the Treatment Center and a provision for a day or other short-term release to allow residents to participate in approved programs outside of the facility.
Over the ensuing years, the consent decrees led to gradual and steady improvements in the general circumstances of confinement and the provision of treatment, as well as to the physical conditions of the facility. As the First Circuit remarked, the course of this litigation King v. Greenblatt, 149 F.3d at 12 (1st Cir.1998). Residents are now housed in a modern facility and live under conditions which are vastly different from those that residents such as King and Williams were subject to in 1972.6 There are a wide-range of therapeutic, educational, vocational and avocational activities available to residents, as compared to what was in place when the complaints were brought. Moreover, there are work opportunities available to residents at the Center and a program in place which allows residents to gradually re-enter the community outside the facility.
While it is generally acknowledged that physical conditions at the Treatment Center improved dramatically since 1972, along with the kinds of treatment, programming and work opportunities, the facility was never free from the tension that existed as a result of its shared control by DMH and DOC. That tension contributed to years of litigation centered around the inevitable conflicts that arose from the dual management of a hybrid facility whose purpose was to provide effective treatment, for which DMH was responsible, in a secure setting, for which DOC was responsible. "`The stream of litigation occasionally overflowed the district court' Pearson III, 990 F.2d at 655, and this court as well." King v. Greenblatt, 52 F.3d 1, 3 (1st Cir.1995).
Following the Pearson and Langton trials,7 I heralded my concern that the court would face many more years of litigation unless some effort was made to address the conflicts and ambiguities raised by the dual agency control of this unique institution. In addition to the discreet claims made in those and other cases, there was ongoing discussion surrounding proposed legislation to abolish the civil commitment statute. In 1988, the Legislature authorized a review of ch. 123A and the Treatment Center as part of a broad-based study of the...
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