US v. Smith, No. 06-2247. When the defendant sought to buy a gun, he falsely stated on an ATF Form 4473 that he had never been committed to a mental hospital (or “funny farm” as people say in polite society). After a conditional guilty plea he argued that the records that the government sought to use to show that he had been involuntarily committed to an asylum were protected from disclosure and the District court should have suppressed because Me. Rev. Stat. Ann. tit. 34-B, § 1207(1) reads “...all orders of commitment, medical and administrative records, application and reports, and facts contained in them ‘as confidential records’” and a state cop reviewed the computer records that “document[ed]the Bangor Police Department's transport of Smith to Acadia Hospital.” Since the police department that did the transporting, unlike the loony bin is not covered by the statutory definition, the cop did nothing wrong.
Read on. For Santa.
He also made a Public Health Service Act argument under 42 U.S.C. § 290dd-2 and 42 C.F.R. § 2.11. The First says that 42 C.F.R. § 2.65(d) provides some kind of balancing test which allows mental applicable records to be used in a criminal investigation or prosecution. Even though the use of a “Blue Paper” was authorized by a magistrate, none of the findings required by the regulation were made. The First figures this way because when the Magistrate was reviewing the request under HIPAA, “neither the government nor the magistrate judge granting the order had any reason to believe, at the time, that the blue paper referenced a drug abuse diagnosis and thus arguably included drug abuse information under 42 U.S.C. § 290dd-2." So, rather than determining whether the Blue Paper (and its various components) are record, the First looks at the “judicial endorsement” part of it, and concludes that the “judicial endorsement” part turns the “blue paper” into a judicial (rather than medical) record which isn’t afforded any protection under the health care statues. The First justifies this by saying that the since the government isn’t introducing evidence of drug use or addiction at trial, none of the interests served by keeping people’s drug treatment secret are injured.
This is all pretty tortured logic, but does anyone really doubt that people that let themselves be involuntarily committed to a mental hospital are ever going to be able to live it down.
Finally, the defendant tries to withdraw his plea. Since this wasn’t preserved, on plain error review, the First says that the District Court judge did a good job of making sure the defendant knew what he was pleading to.
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