I'm just a lowly engineer but I feel as iff I personally have been slandered by sheriff DUchenik. Can I file a bunch of small claims cases against him? Will those cases be won by his DUcheness not showing up?
Not sure what you are saying here but the fact is there is little a Sherriff can do unless the crazy does begin to act out big time, such as trying to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge and causes a big traffic tie up. .As long as someone does not cause a huge problem for the comunity and cost them time and money, there are just to many odd balls causing problems to send them to involuntary commitment.
If I remember correctly it was the early 1970 when under Nixon because of the cost all over the country Hospitals for the diagnoses of the mentally ill were closed down and the poor confused people put on the streets homeless and told they had to get help from local out patient clinics.
It did not matter that the comunity they were in had NO outpatient clinics, some of these poor people needed supervision to just insure they took their medication. If you think things have changed, think again.
One cannot commit a person against their will unless that person has DONE something outrageous to show they are a threat to themselves or others. Simply placing a skull and candles with some dirt in the back yard is odd but that person may be practicing Voodoo and that is a protected religion. OR they may just be putting found objects in some area to get them out of the way.
So if this mans teachers, fellow students, friends and family had marched down to the Sherriffs office and told him that the man was acting strangely, what was he to do about it, the man was an Adult and to lock him up in a mental health facility against his will would bring in 112 lawyers and kidnapping charges for all.
About the Sherriff, if he did get informed some nut was issuing threats against a member or members of the comunity, then his only advice was to the people to get restraining orders against that person. Did any of the recipient's get any kind of restraining order.?
If we expect our police to come running and lock up every person that marches to their own drummer, there would not be enough people left to support them in institutions. Quite a few of us would loose kids that act out, get into trouble and wear red hats when everyone else is wearing green.
