The negative effects on the patient population of Oregon State Hospital of the Enforcement Integration mandate, U.S. Department of Justice

This article describes a 25-year continuous involvement through litigation and investigation of Oregon State Hospital by the U.S. Department of Justice and its designated Oregon civil rights organisation, Disability Rights Oregon (DRO). The main catalyst for these activities was the 1999 U.S. Supreme Court’s Olmstead decision which led to dramatic changes in the composition of the three involuntary patient groups in the hospital. The article focuses on a discussion of the conflicts between suggested hospital improvement dominated by legal rights-oriented organisations versus the requirement of the laws governing the hospitalisation of involuntary patients. This approach failed to analyse the very nature of this forensic hospital at the interface between legal and medical views of what can be accomplished given these complexities. In the end the scope of the programme was sidetracked by the COVID epidemic and the return of Mink litigation to the Ninth Circuit courts, which by choice of the dominant rights groups greatly favoured one group of patients over another equally desiring group, to the detriment of all.