Primary Sources
Nobody Told Me
This Baltimore Sun story, by a reporter who is leaving the paper to join the L.A. Times soon, is incredible for its illustration of government ineptitude.
A 45-year-old partially paralyzed Baltimore County man, who was arrested in 1995 on a series of minor charges including the theft of a tape cassette and a pair of shoelaces, remains locked up in a state hospital even though the charges against him were dropped six years ago.When John Dunkes protested and insisted that he should be released from his locked ward because the charges no longer existed, state mental health officials concluded he was delusional. The proof of his insanity, they said, was his repeated insistence that the charges had been dropped.
“Nobody told us,” said David Helsel, superintendent at Spring Grove, who said he learned that the charges had been dropped when hospital officials were served with a copy of the lawsuit late Wednesday. Helsel said he is looking into the history of Dunkes’ case to determine what happened.
Yeah, I bet it will be an exhaustive inquiry, since nobody seemed to care enough to check out his claims in the first place.
Discussion
Comments are disallowed for this post.
Categories
- No categories
Compassionate conservatism…
Reminds me of a tale that may or may not be apocryphal.
Reporter wants to get the real dope on a reputedly terrible mental hospital, so he checks himself in.
Spends a week as a patient, taking notes on everything he sees. Gets what he needs for a great story, then discloses his identity and asks to be released.
Doctors won’t let him out because he’s clearly delusional.
For one thing, he thinks he’s a reporter. For another, note-taking behavior is diagnostic of mental disease.
Sigh.