Six sex offenders got no damage awards from former New York Gov. George Pataki and other officials who had confined to mental institutions after they served their sentences. One official is liable for $1 to each, a federal jury decided in a case that tested attitudes toward social outcasts.
Former New York Gov. George Pataki (l.) arrives for a federal court appearance in New York on July 23. A jury found Mr. Pataki and two former state officials are 'not liable' for illegally confining six sex offenders to state mental institutions after they had completed their sentences.
Richard Drew/AP
EnlargeA federal jury this week found former New York Gov. George Pataki and two other former state officials ?not liable? for illegally confining six sex offenders to state mental institutions after they had completed their sentences.
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On one hand, Wednesday's decision was not surprising. American politics and society have long struggled with the demand to continue to keep locked up criminals who have committed the most vile crimes but who, according to law, are allowed to go free.?Yet that tendency threatens the integrity of the judicial process, with few willing to stand up for people who have done such reprehensible things, some legal experts say.
Such cases are emotionally fraught and constitute a delicate legal balance between public safety and due process, and the jury's verdict in the New York sex offenders' civil suit points to the difficulty of striking that balance.?
?It?s an ominous development,? says Robert Burt, a law professor at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. These kinds of legal efforts seek ?to turn?confinement [of sexual offenders] away from the ordinary criminal justice system, into a mental health issue, and then to offer treatment."?But the offer is a "fraud" that's not followed up on, he says.
The case centered on a 2005 Pataki administration initiative that called for the psychiatric evaluation and continued confinement of potentially dangerous prisoners slated to be released. Twenty states, including California, Florida, and Illinois, have enacted laws permitting the civil commitment of sexual offenders as of 2010. The Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006 also authorizes the federal government to commit and treat federal sex offenders. But these include legal safeguards that have passed constitutional muster, including judicial review. The Pataki initiative was simply an administrative policy.
In 2006, a federal judge found the Pataki administration's Sexually Violent Predator Initiative to be unconstitutional, and those confined under civil commitments were released. The offenders in the civil suit, each convicted of horrendous sex crimes, sought $10 million in damages.
The jury found Mr. Pataki; Glenn Goord, former correctional services commissioner; and Eileen Consilvio, the former executive director of the Manhattan Psychiatric Center, the hospital where the plaintiffs were held, not liable. The jury did find the former commissioner of the State Office of Mental Health, Sharon Carpinello, liable for their involuntary confinement. It awarded the former prisoners $1 each in damages.
In his instructions to the jury, federal district Judge Jed Rakoff explained that it was ?undisputed? that the procedures of the Sexually Violent Predator Initiative violated constitutional due process. So the issue was, he said, whether this "violation of a plaintiff's rights was done intentionally, recklessly, wantonly, maliciously or the like, or was done, by contrast, in good faith."
For all but Ms. Carpinello, the jury found that they acted in good faith.
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