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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

> The effort will involve hospitalizing people involuntarily, even if they do not pose an immediate risk of harm to others.

>“The common misunderstanding persists that we cannot provide involuntary assistance unless the person is violent,” Mr. Adams said. “This myth must be put to rest. Going forward, we will make every effort to assist those who are suffering from mental illness and whose illness is endangering them by preventing them from meeting their basic human needs.”

How does this work with federal US Supreme Court rulings such Connor Donaldson and Addington Texas:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Connor_v._Donaldson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addington_v._Texas

Some more cases:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Supreme_...

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It works like this: there are no Constitution Police. No one gets arrested for making an unconstitutional law.

NYC especially is pretty good at this: they make a law, it works through the system and gets struck down by SCOTUS, then they immediately make a slightly different law which has to work through the system and be struck down.

It’s way quicker to make a law than it is to strike it down. Ultimately, if the people of a region keep electing lawmakers who make unconstitutional laws, that region will have unconstitutional law most of the time.

California loves doing this as well, especially with gun laws.

Many states did this habitually for decades with restrictive abortion laws.

It does not seem like New York City or New York State enacted any laws in this case.

Law, policy, directive, order, emergency action, etc.

All boils down to “government is doing something with force of law” and is reviewable by SCOTUS.

Thank you for explaining this to everyone. As someone who is disabled with Schizoaffective Bipolar Disorder and suffered the horrors of today's for profit psychiatric hospitals this is not only unlawful but is a disgusting money grab that Adams no doubt will profit from at some point.

Is a law that will, in the future, be found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court unconstitutional before they find it to be so?

Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to view this phenomenon within the context of the balanced powers of government? The Supreme Court has the final say in the constitutionality of a certain law, but that doesn’t make them the most powerful branch of government. They lack the power to try again, and the legislature and the executive have that power.

To me, the system is working as intended when the people elect representatives who repeatedly force the judicial branch to strike down laws the people want. This seems to be a way to redirect this type of question into a political solution, i.e., a way to force people to recognize that what they really want is not a particular law, but a better judiciary or a center Constitution.

After all, the chain of events you’re describing is one that never departs from the mechanisms considered by the Constitution (and the Marbury court, of course, but that ship has sailed).

The problem is that there’s no disincentive to creating laws that are eventually found unconstitutional — a malicious actor is capable of producing ill-formed laws faster, cheaper and with less effort than it takes to identify and remove them. So responsibility isn’t really the issue — the problem is that you can simply overwhelm the other party to make them impotent, and impossible to execute on that responsibility (because if they double their resources, you produce 4X the garbage).

Ideally you would have lawmakers incentivized to produce laws, that upon review, are constitutional, but it remains the supreme court’s jurisdiction to determine that constitutionality.

Like try spamming the FDA drugs unlikely to pass scrutiny — they’ll just shut you out — so you’re incentivized to try to submit something reasonably likely to pass.

I get what you’re saying but I think we approach this from different philosophies (which is fine).

I agree that there is no disincentive to passing laws that the judiciary will nullify (other than the fact they get nullified and have to be replaced). The “malicious actor” of whom you speak appears to me to be the representative of the populace, from whom all power derives, and accordingly I see this as a feature, not a bug. The only incentive they should need to pass useful laws is re-election.

My ideal would be that the courts would interpret and make law, but that political questions like “what comports with the Constitution” would be solved at the ballot box, in the legislature, or with the veto pen, as was intended.

The idea that the judicial branch could be made “impotent” via repeated passing through the duly empowered legislature of bills signed by the duly empowered executive seems like exactly the right amount of power for what was considered by Article III. The courts are, after all, currently the strongest part of our constitutional system.

AFAIK in new york the wards were closed largely in response to abhorrent conditions exposed in a documentary at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willowbrook_State_School and other locations.

I don't know much about case law but seemed that in both cases there must be burden of proof that they are a harm to themselves or others. From my time in SF I have seen more people than I can count walking around with blood and feces caked on their legs. I could see someone like that requiring instituional help.

O'Connor v. Donaldson (per wikipedia)

> ruling that a state cannot constitutionally confine a non-dangerous individual who is capable of surviving safely in freedom by themselves or with the help of willing and responsible family members or friends.

The non-paywalled portion of the article

> Mayor Eric Adams directed the police and emergency medical workers to hospitalize people they deemed too mentally ill to care for themselves, even if they posed no threat to others.

These seem to be the same standard, they are confining people who incapable of caring for themselves, which O'Connor v. Donaldson apparently allowed.

The only difference might be "with the help of willing and responsible family members or friends" but the reality is if someone has help and is accepting it, the police won't even know about it.

They only get involved when those family members and friends call them directly, or the person is found wandering around.

Yeah. I'm also willing to give the city the benefit of the doubt and assume that that small caveat is being taken care of properly and just wasn't included in the quote in the subtitle of the NY times article...

If NYC can pull this off, I wonder what has been stopping it and all the other US cities for all these years.

It's expensive and no one wants to pay for it.

Same thing stopping NYC. They don't have the psych beds available to put these people in.

As always, money.

The "public medical facilities" were terrible, underfunded and everybody shut most of them down.

Of course, nobody actually set up anything to take their place because that would be expensive.

And here we are.

How narrowly defined will "care" be? Can a man choose to be homeless? Does that mean he "can't care for himself" and should be imprisoned in a mental hospital or asylum of some kind?

Being homeless doesn't cut it. Not being aware enough to seek shelter from rain or snow might - that would put them literally at risk of physical harm due to their own inability to avoid it. Shelter doesn't need to be a house, it can be an underpass with tents/sleeping bags etc. If you are trying to stay warm and the sleeping bag is not warm enough that would be considered lack of resources, not lack of mental capability.

On an individual level, I think homeless people who are in obviously poor health (pervasive sores, immobility, etc) would meet the metric. I would also say that many with mental issues who behave unpredictably are ipso facto a danger to others if people feel endangered by them. That may not warrant immediate involuntary detention, but evaluation.

On an aggregate level, I would say two things: 1) I assume most people who are homeless did not choose to be homeless with sound mind and free will. If I am right, then we should do what we can to get them off the streets if they are sane and willing, and take them off the streets involuntarily if they are in decrepit health or are in any way violent.

2) Let's say most of the homeless were living the vagabond life. I asserr there exists a limit on the sustainable homeless population in any community or city. At some point, when do cities say "no you can't shit in the bushes in the park, no you can't have entire parks taken over as makeshift campsites, no we will not tolerate IV drug use which litters our streets"?

More needs done, out of compassion and out of necessity for the housed community.

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