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Article: On drugging prisoners.(Editorials)(Court limits forcible medication of mentally ill)(Editorial)
- Article from:
- The Register Guard (Eugene, OR)
- Article date:
- June 26, 2003
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 The Register Guard. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Byline: The Register-Guard
The U.S. Supreme Court has struck a welcome blow for the rights of the mentally ill with its recent ruling that the Constitution severely limits the state's ability to forcibly medicate mentally ill defendants to make them competent to stand trial.
By a 6-3 vote, justices rightly recognized that the public interest in prosecuting a crime must be weighed against an individual's constitutional rights - rights that too often have been ground up in the gears of the criminal justice system.
The case involved a delusional dentist named Charles Sell, who believed that the government was persecuting him and that communists had ...