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"Court Revives Suit Against Reno Police Over Detainee Suicide"

"Court Revives Suit Against Reno Police Over Detainee Suicide": In late July 2009, the Metropolitan News-Enterprise had this report on a ruling that a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit had issued.

Today, the Ninth Circuit issued an order from which seven judges dissented denying rehearing en banc in the case. Chief Judge Alex Kozinski's dissent from the denial of rehearing en banc begins:

Until this opinion came along, police officers weren't required to serve as babysitters, psychiatrists or social workers, and judges didn't run suicide-prevention programs. Responsibility for preventing suicide rested with the individual and the family, not the state. But the panel has discovered that the Constitution demands a change in job description: Judges will henceforth micromanage the police, who in turn will serve as mental health professionals. The panel's reasoning has no stopping point, and our decision to let it stand threatens unprecedented judicial intervention in our local institutions.

Chief Judge Kozinski's real-life good friend Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt was the author of the original three-judge panel opinion. Any further review of the case will now have to come, if at all, from the U.S. Supreme Court.

Full post as published by How Appealing on January 08, 2010 (boomark / email).