Jailers Get OK to Drug Prisoners : Supreme Court: A ruling gives prison officials sweeping power to force inmates to take anti-psychotic drugs.

The Supreme Court today gave prison officials sweeping power to force inmates to take anti-psychotic drugs.

The 6-3 ruling in a Washington state case is a victory for prison officials and doctors who say they, and not judges, should decide when such powerful, behavior-modifying drugs are administered.

The justices said prisoners are not entitled to court hearings or other due-process safeguards before they must take the medication.

“Given the requirements of the prison environment,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the court, the state may “treat a prison inmate who has a serious mental illness with anti-psychotic drugs against his will if the inmate is dangerous to himself or others and the treatment is in the inmate’s medical interest.”

The decision as to whether to use the drugs in such circumstances is best left to prison officials and psychiatrists, not judges, Kennedy said.

Kennedy was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Byron R. White, Harry A. Blackmun, Sandra Day O’Connor and Antonin Scalia.

Justices John Paul Stevens, William J. Brennan and Thurgood Marshall dissented.

Stevens, writing for the dissenters, said the court mistakenly “has concluded that a mock trial before an institutionally biased tribunal constitutes due process of law. A competent individual’s right to refuse psychotropic medication is an aspect of liberty requiring the highest order of (constitutional) protection.”

Washington Corrections Secretary Chase Riveland said the decision was an important one but doesn’t mean his department will go on a medication binge.

“I’m not suggesting that we should be willy nilly running around medicating people. We need to be sure that people have appropriate input into the medication that they’re taking,” he said.

“There have been abuses historically in the country, not necessarily in prison only, but in general. I think that . . . if medically appropriate it’s very helpful,” Riveland said.

Ruling in a separate case today, however, the Supreme Court said that people held against their will at state mental hospitals without receiving legally required hearings may sue state officials in federal court for monetary damages.

The justices voted 5 to 4 to reverse lower-court decisions involving a Florida man who was held in a state hospital for five months without a hearing that state law requires within 48 hours.

In the inmate case, the high court overturned a Washington State Supreme Court ruling in 1988 that convicted robber Walter Harper, diagnosed as schizophrenic, must be given a court hearing before anti-psychotic drugs are administered to him.