Thanks, Donal. The paragraph below*** is unclear. I seem to have conflated two things: whether the degree of force used by the police was uncalled for, and whether, if competent and capable of deciding how he wanted to be treated (or not treated), Wrana nevertheless _had_ to take the medicine the staff wanted him to take. On the first point, the answer seems to be clear: the force was excessive and uncalled for. On the second, the answer is also clear. No adult who is competent and capable can be forced to take medication or to undergo any medical procedure. On this, the Supreme Court has ruled (Cruzan v. Director...1990, to which I gave a link). Most states have statutes which incorporate this principle of the right to refuse medication.
My main interest in this case had to do with whether Wrana was competent to make and capable of making his own decisions. I thought that if he had been, the staff's attempts to 'get him' to take it despite his refusal should have been by way of encouragement and persuasion, not 'force' (whatever force could have meant in this situation). I grant that Wrana might have reacted violently to merely having been told that it was time for his medication.
The newspaper reports I've read call the facility where Wrana lived either an assisted living facility or a retirement home; they've also implied that somehow Wrana 'had' to take his medication, but refused. I've inferred from the descriptions of where he lived that he was not incompetent to make or incapable of making his own decisions, and perhaps the argument to the best hypothesis is that everyone was aware of this and that the staff had done no more than tell Wrana it was time to take his medication.
I wanted to dispel the belief that if someone is in a retirement home or an assisted living facility he or she has lost or given up the rights that all US citizens enjoy; a shadow of this belief falls over the accounts of what made Wrana behave as he did. I speak of this 'shadow' on behalf of Lawrence and myself.
I'll respond to Donal's other remarks later. Apparently every city, village, and hamlet in the US now has a SWAT team.
Robert Paul ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ***It's impossible to infer, from what I've read, what the family's view of
Wrana's competency was. They're reported to have been shocked and amazed by the actions of the SWAT team members but nowhere are they reported to have said anything like, 'He didn't have to take his medicine if he didn't want to.' It would appear that everyone involved assumed the he could not have refused—objected, maybe, but not refused.>
Speaking from afar, I am not sure this is right - in any case, issues of competence and capability are here at best secondary, at worst irrelevant. Assuming US law is similar to English law, the issue is simply the level of threat and what is reasonable force to meet that threat - it does not matter whether the person constituting the threat is competent or capable of taking medicine etc. that might have obviated their threatening behaviour nor does it matter whether they are in a voluntary or involuntary regime. That said, given the apparent level of threat then shooting the man hardly seems reasonable - and it is on this that the legality of the homicide may turn. The details of such cases matter immensely to judgments of what is reasonable, of course - but it would seem a very dangerous precedent to accept the legality of shooting a man in such circumstances, even if he were 'armed' with a knife. Personally, I have suspicions about the trigger-happy nature of specialist firearms teams [like a SWAT team], despite the assurances to the contrary from the authorities of their specialist training. Anyone reading the papers here would likely infer that if a specialist firearms team in the UK gets a chance to shoot you when you are considered 'armed' (even if you have not fired and could not immediately do so) they are likely to take the chance - the riots of 2011 here were triggered after such an incident; and in another case [afair] a man in a pub reported to be armed with a shotgun (which turned out to be a wooden leg poking out of his holdall) was shot dead outside after a (very brief) confrontation with armed officers. Direct reform of the such teams is beyond the public - and so the mechanisms for finding their actions unlawful become crucial for ensuring these teams are held accountable and to the right standards.
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