ST. LOUIS • A federal judge ruled in a trial in September that Missouri’s treatment of civilly committed sexually violent predators was not constitutional.
In her opinion, U.S. District Judge Audrey G. Fleissig noted there was a “pervasive sense of hopelessness” at the Department of Mental Health’s Sex Offender Rehabilitation and Treatment Services program, or SORTS, which has facilities in Farmington and Fulton.
Seven months later, the remedy phase of the class-action lawsuit slogs on.
A March 30 status report hearing didn’t happen and has been extended to April 25.
Attorneys on both sides of the case have been privately negotiating a resolution, with agreement from the court to do so. There are indications of a logjam between plaintiff attorneys and those for the state, which lost at trial.
“Here are the losers at this stage telling us we are done negotiating,” Eric Selig, a lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said March 31 in Kansas City at a Missouri Association of Defense Lawyers awards banquet.
Nanci Gonder, a spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office, said it wouldn’t comment as the case is ongoing.
The lawsuit started in 2009 as a complaint from patients who didn’t think they should be charged for care and treatment at SORTS that they didn’t want.
The Eastern District of Missouri assigned the case on a pro-bono basis to a lead litigator at the Clayton-based law firm Armstrong Teasdale.
The attorney, Richard Scherrer, who typically would bill clients more than $500 an hour, broadened the case to a class action lawsuit that accused SORTS of being a prison disguised as a mental health hospital because nobody was being released for completing treatment.
Before the trial ended last April, Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, supported the SORTS program as a needed public safety tool. He said judges weighed annual reports to determine when patients deserve to be released.
But plaintiffs’ attorneys, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri, sifted through hundreds of thousands of pages of the program’s documents and found a damning memo. The former chief of operations wrote in 2009 that 16 patients could be moved to the St. Louis Psychiatric Rehabilitation Center, a less restrictive facility at 5300 Arsenal Street. The patients weren’t moved.
Scherrer, who is no longer the lead litigator of the plaintiff’s case, said at the recent awards banquet in Kansas City that Armstrong Teasdale intends to bill the state for its work.
Jesse Bogan • 314-340-8255
@jessebogan on Twitter
———
©2016 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Visit the St. Louis Post-Dispatch at www.stltoday.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
