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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   17432 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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A culture-war-adjacent court opinion that @The_Nybbler may find entertaining:

  • An 80-year-old man applies for a permit to buy a rifle. The permit is denied, solely because he was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital for four days forty years ago. He applies for expungement of the records of that commitment, so that he can get the permit.

  • The judge denies the application for expungement.

T.B.'s problematic interaction with LifeStream staff raised questions in the court's mind about T.B.'s "candor to the [c]ourt and fundamental issues that are here."

[T.B.] told the people [at LifeStream] that he was suffering from anxiety and depression. And he said he did that because that’s what he thought he had to say in order to get this appointment so that he could get the evaluation. And a concern to me is that he was not particularly honest with these folks about why he wanted this evaluation.

In that vein, the judge took issue with T.B.'s dismissive characterization of the nature of his hospitalization at Ancora versus the hospital record—namely, that after questioning the staff released him.

In the report it says, "unable to contain on open unit; violent outbursts; threatening; severely agitated; threatening others; yelling; demanding; attempted to strangle his wife at home; violent outbursts; tried to tear side rails off of the [bed]". So, this is not a man who showed up at Ancora mildly agitated or upset, but was described by the doctors down there as threatening behavior, so agitated they couldn't talk to him and violent outbursts towards the people on the staff there.

Regarding his present condition, the court noted that despite the medical reports stating he was stable, T.B. exhibited signs of memory problems and a lack of awareness regarding his own medication regimen.

[T.B.] doesn’t even know what medication he’s taking for his [d]iabetes or for his high cholesterol situation or his [h]yperlipidemia. And that, to me, speaks volumes about not that he’s dangerous to the public safety, but why would we give an 80-year-old man, who can’t even be responsible for his own health, access to a firearm that he wants to use for target practice with his friends. You know, is he going to forget to put the safety on the firearm when he isn’t at the range doing target practice? Is he going to forget to secure it in his home so that people who come to visit don’t have access to it? That’s what’s really of concern to this court.

  • The appeals panel affirms. "The trial court reasonably determined that defendant failed to meet his burden to demonstrate the expungement was in the public interest." No second amendment for him!

This is an object lesson in why people who think they don't need lawyers for stuff like this generally do need lawyers (unless, of course, this guy was so bad that he had a lawyer and the lawyer couldn't do anything about it). His big mistakes were:

  1. He tried to downplay the 1983 commitment with testimony that was contrary to the medical records. My bitch ex wife gave me some pills that made me crazy but not too crazy because the doctors quickly realized I shouldn't have been there is pretty much textbook self-serving bullshit that judges hear regularly. A lawyer would have examined him so as to frame the matter as a guy who turned to drugs to deal with the stress of a bad marriage, which caused him to do regrettable things that he doesn't entirely remember.

  2. He lied to the psychiatrist who examined him about why he was there because he thought he needed to to get an appointment, and then admitted his dishonesty to the court. A lawyer would have made him an appointment with a doctor who would provide the exact kind of evaluation the court looks for in cases like this.

  3. There were statements in the file suggesting the guy was taking psych medications that he couldn't provide an explanation for other than that he wasn't taking any psych meds. He also seemed to have a more intimate knowledge of Lifestream and the doctors that practiced there than someone whose contact with the mental health system ended 40 years prior.

  4. Most people who were involuntarily committed will have had continued psychiatric treatment for some time afterward and a history of how their condition progressed. When I was at the disability bureau, if I saw an involuntary commitment on someone's record and no other psych history, I'd assume they were homeless or in some other kind of situation where they were prevented from getting treatment.

  5. We have no idea, from reading the opinion, what this guy was actually like or how he came off in court.

In other words, the judge could tell that the guy was full of shit, and since he has the burden of proof, she wasn't going to grant the expungement. Keep in mind that the court isn't going to subpoena this guy's entire medical history, so they're only relying on what he brought with him. Given that the guy doesn't come off as trustworthy and there's reason to believe he's more familiar with certain things than he's letting on, the court might have suspected that the guy wasn't providing a complete mental health record.

Yeah, maybe he was actually crazy?

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