The high court slows a trend
Pennhurst State School and Hospital, a sprawling institution in Spring City, Pa., is home to 1,200 mentally retarded people. The facility has a history of being understaffed, dirty and violent. Three years ago, in response to a class-action suit, a federal district judge ordered that Pennhurst eventually be closed, and appointed an overseer to place residents in facilities where they would have more freedom. An appeals court backed the judge but allowed Pennhurst to remain open—in effect, under the court's supervision—to serve the most troubled patients.
Taken together, the decisions added momentum to the national "deinstitutionalization" movement, which aims to transfer mental patients from hospitals to halfway houses or even to their families. They also reinforced a growing tendency of federal courts to take control of school districts, prisons and other state institutions in order to enforce certain rights. Last week, however, the Supreme Court overturned the two rulings in a 6-to-3 decision likely to slow both trends.
The decision, written by Justice William Rehnquist, focused on a 1975 statute in which Congress provided funds for certain state mental health programs. Included in the statute is a patients' "bill of rights" that provides, among other things, for "appropriate treatment" in "the setting that is least restrictive of the person's personal liberty." The appeals court had upheld the argument that since Pennsylvania accepted money under the statute, it was obliged to guarantee those rights. Rehnquist disagreed. The bill of rights section "does no more than express a congressional preference for certain kinds of treatment," he wrote. It "is too thin a reed to support the rights and obligations read into it by the court below." Even the dissenters agreed with the majority that the appeals court had gone too far in taking over Pennhurst.
The ruling dims the prospects of similar suits now pending in several other states. Henceforth, advocates of greater freedom for mental patients may have to focus on a different question: whether the Constitution, as opposed to federal statutes, gives patients a right to treatment in the least restrictive possible setting.
In another action last week, the Supreme Court continued its pattern of expanding a citizen's guarantee of privacy in his home. The Justices decided, 7 to 2, that an arrest warrant alone does not authorize police to enter homes, other than a suspect's own, where they think he may be hiding. Specific search warrants for those homes are required, wrote Thurgood Marshall, because an arrest warrant protects the rights of only the suspect.