Champion of Civil Rights: Judge John Minor Wisdom

13. A Vigilant Steward of Fairness

13 A Vigilant Steward of Fairness John Minor Wisdom’s reputation as a resolute defender and protector of civil rights is most commonly, and justifiably, linked to his decisions in school desegregation and voting rights cases. But his civil rights legacy manifestly is not limited to those high-profile, and unquestionably seminal, rulings. Wisdom opinions blazed new trails in a wide range of areas. Notable among these are his rulings recognizing a civilly and criminally detained individual’s right to psychiatric treatment, a prison inmate’s right to recover damages for a sexual assault by a prison guard, and government workers’ and students’ rights to freedom of speech, religion, and association. And the common strand that ties all of these and hundreds of other opinions together is the manifest influence of Wisdom’s innate humanity and sense of decency and fairness . Not only was he devoted to preserving and enforcing the rule of law, he was motivated by a passionate desire to ensure that operation of the law provided everyone with a fair and square shake with respect to both result and process. The lessons taught by his mother about the importance of treating everyone with fairness and dignity were never lost on her son. In 1974, Wisdom wrote the first federal appellate court opinion holding that persons who were involuntary committed, through civil proceedings , to state mental hospitals possessed a federal constitutional 304 Champion of Civil Rights 1. Three years earlier, noted district judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr., of Montgomery, Alabama, had recognized the existence of this constitutional right to treatment for civilly committed mentally ill patients in Wyatt v. Stickney, 325 F.Supp. 781 (M.D.Ala.1971). Wisdom not only credited Johnson with being the first to formulate such a right, but incorporated Johnson’s formulation of the scope of the constitutional right to treatment, that is, one that provided individuals with a realistic opportunity to be cured to improve his or her mental condition. In addition, back in 1966, Chief Judge David Bazelon of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals had written an opinion in Rouse v. Cameron, 373 F.2d 451 (D.C.Cir.1966), holding that the federal Mentally Ill Act of 1964 created a statutory right to treatment on behalf of mental patients in the District of Columbia. 2. Donaldson v. O’Connor, 493 F.2d 507 (5th Cir.1974), vacated and remanded, 422 U.S. 804, 95 S.Ct. 2486, 45 L.Ed.2d 396 (1975). 3. Letter to Griffin B. Bell and James P. Coleman from John M. Wisdom, April 2, 1974. right to treatment.1 This ruling came out of an extraordinary case involving a thirty-five-year-old man who had been confined by a Florida state court to a state mental institution for fifteen years without receiving any occupational therapy or psychiatric treatment. Toward the end of his confinement, the man had filed suit seeking damages against several hospital and state mental health officials, alleging that they had deprived him of his constitutional right to receive treatment. A jury found that the boy had never posed a physical danger to himself or to others and returned a verdict in his favor. The defendants’ appeal to the Fifth Circuit was heard by a panel composed of Wisdom, Richard Rives, and Lewis R. Morgan, a former federal district judge from Georgia who had been nominated by President Lyndon Johnson to fill the circuit court vacancy created by Elbert Tuttle’s retirement in June 1968. On behalf of a unanimous panel, Wisdom boldly and unambiguously announced that “a person involuntarily civilly committed to a state mental hospital has a constitutional right to receive such individual treatment as will give him a reasonable opportunity to be cured or to improve his mental condition.”2 His formal explanation was that where the involuntary confinement, as in this case, was predicated on the subject’s need for treatment, rather than on his posing a threat to himself or others, the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment compelled the government to provide adequate treatment. But the true impetus for the ruling was Wisdom’s outrage at the harrowing facts of this case. By the time he filed his damage claim, the plaintiff had been confined involuntarily in a locked ward with sixty other patients for nearly fifteen years without a shred of commonly accepted psychiatric treatment. It was these shocking circumstances that convinced Wisdom that his case was a compelling vehicle for proclaiming...