Forcing psychotics to take drugs against their will is not a great plan, however it’s better than the alternative of letting clearly delusional and dangerous individuals become human time bombs inside institutions and on the streets. So why don’t we drug them? Ask the California Supreme Court which felt that coercive administration of medication could have a significant additional burden on the patient’s liberty interest.

The case was the result of a lawsuit brought by Kanuri Qawi and which was documented in a well-written front page Los Angeles Times feature story.

Qawi was a very violent man. In 1990, muttering something about how blond women had caused the Vietnam War attacked and savagely beat a man and woman walking down the street.

In prison, he became gripped by paranoia. He had a “magician” wife who bound him and injected him with cocaine. In a memo, he ranted: “I want diet special food hot…. I do not want special food hot made by the Black family gang.”

Twice, records show, he tasted freedom. Paroled in 1993, he lasted less than a month; police found him lying on the sidewalk and sent him back to prison after he spat on an officer. The next year, he was paroled again; this time, he was picked up after seven weeks on suspicion of stalking a clerk at J.C. Penney and threatening to place her under a “voodoo curse.”

In 1995 Qawi was sent to Atascadero State Hospital, a mental institution north of San Luis Obispo, where he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and put on an antipsychotic drug.

Qawi sued the state saying that the drugs being forced on him represented a “sufficient intrusion upon bodily security” and a violation of his constitutional rights. Surprisingly, 1st District Court of Appeals agreed with one of his arguments and significantly increased the burden of proof required to involuntarily medicate a patient.

The appellate court and Qawi’s lawyer, Renee Torres, should have been able to predict when a person as violent and delusional as Qawi were to be paroled back on to the streets which happened on February 17, 2005. Soon he became paranoid, sensing there was an assassination plot against him. Not long later he stabbed a man named John Milton and let the decaying body sit in the apartment they shared for a week before it was discovered by authorities.

Qawi’s lawyer felt that just because her client was violent, delusional, and involuntarily confined didn’t mean that he couldn’t make decisions regarding his medical care. Perhaps she and the 1st District Court of Appeals can explain that logic to John Milton’s family.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 17th, 2007 at 11:45 pm by Insider and is filed under Your Tax Dollars In Action, Politically Correct ... and stupid. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.