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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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