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The Journal asked law professor ALEXANDER BROOKS to examine the implications of this case for the homeless mentally ill who populate the nation's streets and public shelters. Will the publicity surrounding this isolated case improve their situation?
Local civil commitment cases are not ordinarily featured on the front pages of the New York Times and on national television. However, there was a difference in the case of Joyce Brown, the street women known to the public and the courts as "Billie Boggs." Her efforts to resist involuntary hospitalization became a cause célèbre in New York City in late 1987 and early 1988.
Billie Boggs, as she originally called herself, is a 40-year-old black woman who lived on the street for a year near a warm air grate on New York's fashionable Upper East Side and who panhandled money for food. She attracted the attention of a mental health team created by Mayor Ed Koch. The HELP team (Homeless Emergency Liaison Project), as it was called, was part of a program to remove mentally ill people from the streets and place them in mental hospitals. Koch observed Billie Boggs on one of his trips and was told that she could not be involuntarily hospitalized because psychiatrists said she was not dangerous, as the law required.
Billie Boggs was physically healthy after a year on the street, but her clothes had become ragged and smelly, parts of her body were naked, and she wore no shoes. Winter was approaching and street people have been known to freeze to death on cold nights. Her clothes and body were covered with urine and feces. Boggs used the street as a toilet.
Billie Boggs cursed and screamed obscenities at passers-by. She picked fights, especially with black men. She ran into traffic. Although she bought food with some of the money she was given, she urinated on dollar bills and folded them into neat squares that she kept near her.
Koch's HELP team, which included a psychiatrist, offered her food and clothes. She rejected them. Ultimately, the HELP team, fearing that Billie would come to harm, decided to hospitalize her. U was necessary to bring Billie to Bellevue Hospital in New York City in handcuffs. Shortly after she was admitted,...