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And the additional due process rights, and numerous opportunities to seek freedom, and the burden of proof falling on the government, and the burden of proof being much harsher on the government, yada yada.
It's possible, but a) we don't know and b) there's absolutely a lot of well-represented and reasonable clients that just don't present well to judges, especially when you're talking 80-year-olds.
Yeah, that this is "what you have to do" is a good part of my objection. Access to justice and civil rights dependent on thousands or tens of thousands of dollars is a right denied. (The other part is that it's far from clear that would be enough.)
Yes, the procedural posture here treat someone who had a mental health commitment like a convicted felon. Is that proceeding to issue a mental health commitment equivalent to the conviction of a felon?
I can't find the process New Jersey used in 1980, since a 1987 revision to state law was noteworthy for requiring a finding of dangerousness and mental illness, but the current law still allows initial holds for 72 hours without ever seeing or hearing from a judge, and an intermediate period up to 20 days with a court order under reduced requirements. Even assuming that T.B. had something more serious than a rubber stamp in 1980, it still had nowhere near the burden of proof, clear notice of law he was violating, or any similar due process right. (He near-certainly wouldn't have had access to an attorney, even had he seen a courtroom, and might have even been ex parte for the court hearing given the state of laws in other nearby jurisdictions at the time.)
There's a reason that this overlaps closer to the GVRO or various Red Flag laws -- but those processes are intentionally supposed to be temporary! The federal laws here apply even to mental health episodes that happened before the GCA1968 was even passed, and they chase a person to their grave unless specifically expunged.
Is the action here similar? Felons can be disarmed because being a felon is a long-lasting indicator of propensity to act violently outside the law (although even that's kinda marginal given how broad modern 'felonies' have become). Was T.B.'s issue in 1980 some long-lasting inherent problem that would likely recur? Or was it one time event? We don't know. T.B. provided some evidence that he had no current mental illness. No one on the court provides any evidence against that, they just woolgathered about how it wasn't trustworthy enough in some vague ways that their guts didn't like. The judge specifically said that these gutchecks pointed "not that he’s dangerous".
From a statutory perspective, the petitioner is only required to prove that their illness is in remission or substantially improved; the court (and the original medical director) are the ones to "find" if the petitioner "will not likely act in a manner dangerous to the public safety and finds that the grant of relief is not contrary to the public interest" based on "the circumstances of why the commitment or determination was imposed upon the petitioner, the petitioner's mental health record and criminal history, and the petitioner's reputation in the community". The petitioner demonstrated that their condition was substantially improved, and provided some evidence that they were not likely to act in a matter dangerous to public safety. And the judge, rather than pointing to some part of the petitioner's mental health record, or reputation in the community, or circumstances of their original commitment, said that they didn't like some of the evidence the petitioner provided or the petitioner's demeanor, and then the case is done, caput, do not pass go, do not collect your rights or your 200 USD.
I frankly have no idea how the judge in question here can honestly take a look at a forty-year period with no criminal history or further interactions with the mental health system or criminal justice system, a commitment that the judge found was motivated by the man attempting to strangle his wife, and say "I don’t know if that means that his condition is substantially improved or in substantial remission." I don't have high opinions of New Jersey cops! But I don't have that low an opinion, either.
That would just be annoying in other contexts. I'd like a lot more due process and a lot less 'whatever some jerkoff judge thought was good policy between ranting in their chambers', but I'm not optimistic about matters as simple as ['maybe judges shouldn't hear trials on laws that they pledge specifically to support'.
Here, we are talking a constitutional right, a petitioner who has never been convicted of a crime and may never have seen the inside of a court room before this appeal, and a judge who has rewritten the law until his or her only guiding star is 'what can I imagine' and only boundaries are 'could impact the public interest', in a jurisdiction that has spent literal generations and has extant caselaw demanding "the citizen acts at his peril" in this context. It is a problem when there is an unclear burden on the petitioner to fight any evidence that any judge may ever want or make up, in a hearing that becomes an adversarial hearing against that judge, and where there is no further opportunity or discussion before trial about what the judge decided was the magic words beyond 'hire the best and most specialized lawyer possible'.
T.B. here might well (maybe even likely would) fail an honest analysis of dangerousness, but we didn't get that. T.B. might well (maybe even likely would) fail an honest analysis of improvement in mental health condition. We don't even get a judiciary interest in that. At best, you can argue that this complied with the statute, as long as you put a heavy thumb on judicial interpretation of the 'well, it doesn't say we can't' sort. The courts could have subpeona'd medical records, or written that the petitioner refused to provide access. The courts could speak to a criminal record or lack thereof. The courts could have pointed to some critical issue in the original commitment hearing, if any existed, pointing to likely repetition or recurrence. They could have asked his wife or coworkers or doctors if he was strangling them. They didn't. Nor, for that matter did the judges comment on a lack of submissions on these points from the petition’s side.
They tea-leafed whether a guy could remember a name of a medication while speaking extemporaneously, or whether he might forget to use a safety. They announced that he needs some time working in the mental health system to prove to them he had gotten better (how long? why would that matter to an 80-year old?). And then they washed their hands of any questions of whether he was a danger to the community or mentally ill or what say you.
To treat this as in the interest of justice because you, personally, can smell a rat, in a case you couldn't be bothered to look at the first sheet before writing about?
I think the implication of the proceedings was that this was not true, clearly wasn't true, and the court didn't want to waste time and money on sorting it so used other procedural grounds to close the matter.
Most people who fail in these kinds of proceedings are so allergic to basic competence and not being an entitled asshole that nobody who actually witnesses the situation feels bad. In the same that you look at most police encounters and go: "Should he have beat his ass? No. Did he absolutely earn it? Yes."
Most principled third parties read about these situations and fear some authoritarian judge taking rights away (which does happen) but the vast majority is "please give me something, anything to work with.....okay I guess you won't."
But from a due process perspective, that's an abomination. If the problem genuinely was that the court believed TB had a criminal history or other occurrences of mental health breakdown, TB has absolutely no reason, having read the court's public record, to actually go and find proof on those things. There's not even a reference to what better proof would be about.
((Admittedly, because it's quite possible TB presented perfectly adequate proof, given that the expungement process requires petitioners give permission for a full background and mental health record search, and the law requires the court to ask the committing facility. I don't trust New Jersey judges.))
And more critically, it's trivially resolvable. Assuming without evidence that the court would be crippled by asking for criminal records, it costs the judge mere seconds to write out that the plaintiff needed to provide them. Instead, if he doesn't die or run out of money or patience first, TB's going to back to court with a list of his medications in his pocket, proudly mispronounce every single one, and the judge will find some other excuse that doesn't really matter.
And if judges want us to believe that, they a) need to actually write it into the public record, and b) have public records giving normal people reason to distrust them.
I think a good thought experiment here is to look at traffic tickets.
Do you think cops should have flexibility in giving a ticket or not?
Choosing not to is also abomination of due process, it is inconsistent and potentially abusable and corrupt. It's also flexible and can work out well.
The system works better for most people overall when have some flexibility in the system. Some people are screwed over by that flexibility however in my experience it's usually for good reason (in this case: guy is likely an asshole).
If you want to remove the slack and flexibility in the system you can certainly advocate for that but you'll find it probably isn't what you want in practice.
With respect to this guy specifically, I got the impression that it seemed like he had more involvement with mental health care that he was letting on and was trying to minimize which is not a good sign.
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I understand what you're saying, but you're imposing a standard on the court that simply doesn't exist. He was involuntarily committed in 1983. He's presumed unfit to own firearms. You may have a disagreement about the process that was in place before 1987, but that's not what's at issue here. The guy isn't arguing that the record should be expunged because his original commitment was invalid, it's unlikely that he would be able to prove that it was invalid due to the passage of time, and the only way such an argument would work would be in the context of a ruling that all involuntary commitments prior to 1987 are presumptively invalid on procedural grounds. But again, that's not the issue here, and the court isn't going to relitigate this on its own.
Operating from that presumption, it's T.B.'s burden to prove that he qualifies for expungement, not the court's burden to prove that he doesn't. So, yeah, the court could have subpeonaed any number of different things, but they didn't, because they're under no obligation to prove that this guy is unfit to own weapons. That's already been established, insofar as the law is concerned, and if he wants the expungement, he has to provide the evidence himself. And what evidence did he provide? His own testimony, which suffered a debilitating lack of credibility, and a note from a psychiatrist which he admitted was obtained under false pretenses. The only thing we're left with that doesn't implicate T.B's lack of credibility is his lack of criminal record, which is persuasive but not dispositive. There's no provision of New Jersey law stating that the court has to grant an expungement just because someone hasn't committed any crimes for a period of time.
There's no legal issue here. All we have is you disagreeing with the factual findings of a judge who met the guy and reviewed the entire record, which, fine, you're entitled to your opinion. But it's no different than people who disagree with a jury verdict based on news reports they saw on TV. It's a factual issue, not a legal one, and no appeals court is going to overturn a finding of fact unless the evidence is so overwhelming that the conclusion is patently unreasonable.
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