Cops Mistake Lou Gehrig’s Disease for Insanity – Kidnap, Strip Search, and Jail Man for Days
He was strip searched by police, handcuffed to a table, diagnosed as having “mental health issues, and jailed.
In response to a Fourth Amendment lawsuit filed by attorneys for The Rutherford Institute, government officials insist they had “probable cause” to arrest a 37-year-old disabled man, allegedly because of his slurred speech and unsteady gait. Gordon Goines, a resident of Waynesboro, Va., who suffers from a neurological condition similar to multiple sclerosis, was then strip searched by police, handcuffed to a table, diagnosed as having “mental health issues,” and subsequently locked up for five days in a mental health facility against his will and with no access to family and friends.
Disputing the assertions of the Valley Community Services Board (VCSB), one of its mental health screeners and three police officers, Rutherford Institute attorneys have asked the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals to reinstate Goines v. Valley Community Services Board, arguing that citizens have a clearly established right to be free from mental health seizures by government officials unless there is compelling evidence justifying seizure.
“By giving government officials the power to declare individuals mentally ill and detain them against their will without first ensuring that they are actually trained to identify such illness, the government has opened the door to a system in which involuntary detentions can be used to make people disappear,” said John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “Indeed, government officials in the Cold War-era Soviet Union often used psychiatric hospitals as prisons in order to isolate political prisoners from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally.”
Read more: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/cops-mistake-lou-gehrigs-disease-insanity-kidnap-strip-search-and-jail-man-days
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