September 16, 2008

The New York Civil Liberties Union today testified before a City Council committee on the urgent need to reform the city's public mental health facilities, including Kings County Hospital Center in Brooklyn where staff ignored a psychiatric patient as she lay dying on a waiting room floor this past June.

Donna Lieberman, NYCLU executive director, addressed the Committee on Mental Health, Mental Retardation, Alcoholism, Drug Abuse and Disability Services at a hearing called to examine the conditions of city-run psychiatric facilities.

“We welcome the committee's oversight, which is long overdue,” said Lieberman. “What has happened in Kings County Hospital, and indeed, throughout the city's system of publicly-funded psychiatric care facilities, is an affront to human dignity. New Yorkers most in need of care and support have been denied their basic rights by the very institutions entrusted to protect them.”

In May 2007, the NYCLU, Mental Hygiene Legal Service (MHLS) and Kirkland & Ellis LLP filed a federal lawsuit in Brooklyn on behalf of thousands of New Yorkers who have been and continue to be subjected to dangerous conditions at Kings County Hospital Center (KCHC). The lawsuit describes the hospital's psychiatric emergency room and inpatient unit as “a chamber of filth, decay, indifference and danger,” and seeks an end to abusive treatment in the hospital's psychiatric facilities where patients have been regularly ignored and those that dare advocate for themselves have been punished with forcible injections of psychotropic drugs.

The neglectful and abusive conditions at KCHC drew national attention in July after the NYCLU released security camera footage of Esmin Green, a 49-year-old Brooklyn woman, dying on the waiting room floor of the hospital's psychiatric emergency room in June. The footage, acquired through the lawsuit, shows hospital staff ignoring Green as she writhed on the floor. Green had been in the waiting room for more than 24 hours.

Following release of the video, a federal court ordered the city to initiate emergency reforms at the hospital, including requirements that every patient be checked every 15 minutes, that there be no more than 25 patients at any time in the psychiatric emergency ward, and that detailed records on the ward be turned over every week to the advocates involved in the lawsuit.

“The problems in our city-run psychiatric facility are systemic, and the solutions that we have repeatedly called for require a sustained and systemic response,” said Beth Haroules, the NYCLU's lead counsel on the litigation. “Meaningful reform will require a sustained commitment from hospital administrators, as well as from city officials and elected representatives who are responsible for ensuring that its facilities operate within the law.”

Lieberman urged the Council to ensure the court-ordered reforms get implemented at KCHC and that other city-run psychiatric facilities abide by them as well. She recommended that the Council hold quarterly hearings to monitor the status of the reform efforts.