An email from a federal judge in Brooklyn arrived unexpectedly one day in late May, requesting my appearance in court.
“It may seem to be ancient history,” the judge wrote, but there was a seismic development in a landmark legal case that I had helped set off nearly a quarter-century ago.
Several weeks later, scores of federal and state officials, lawyers and leaders of advocacy groups gathered for a hearing in a packed Brooklyn courtroom used for ceremonial events. They were joined by several people with mental illness whose lives had been transformed by the lengthy legal proceedings that led to this day.
One of them, a woman named Diana Vila, had brought a collection of tiny plant cuttings with patterned leaves that she gently placed in the palms of people in the courtroom as thanks for what the case had done for her.
The hearing was the culmination of a class-action lawsuit that affected thousands of mentally ill people like Ms. Vila and had been quietly grinding on for 22 years. It had been prompted by a series of articles in The New York Times in April 2002 that investigated questionable deaths and widespread abuses of mentally ill residents in a system of state-regulated, privately run adult homes in New York City.
I was the reporter who wrote that series.
The litigation had stumbled at times, but was now finally coming to a close, with an appreciable impact: Many adult home residents with severe mental illness had been moved to better housing in New York City. In the end, the lawsuit had fundamentally changed a system that had come to symbolize the state’s failure to care for some of its most vulnerable people.
At the hearing, the judge, Nicholas G. Garaufis, praised the “extraordinary dedication” of the advocacy groups and officials who brought the class-action lawsuit. “Their commitment never wavered, despite the challenges we all faced in the last 22 years,” he said.
The judge singled out residents of the adult homes themselves, saying that their “resilience has been a testament to the power of collective action.”
One of those residents, Deborah Hunter, went to the lectern and told the court that when she lived for 11 years in an adult home, she was overmedicated and shunted away.
“I felt broken,” she said. “Took away my ability to think for myself. Stripped my pride.”
Because of the class-action lawsuit, she had moved into her own apartment. On a typical day now, she said, “I put the key in the door to my home and have peace of mind.”
Protracted litigation is a reality in the American legal system, but 22 years is long by any standard. Without decisive action, the case had dragged on while residents like Ms. Turner and Ms. Vila had languished in adult homes.
The case moved so slowly that some adult home residents died before they could be helped. New Yorkers’ attention largely shifted to the more glaring problem of mentally ill homeless people on the streets and subways.
Still, the courtroom that day in late June was a surprisingly uplifting place, as if years of frustration had given way to a different emotion: hope.
The path to meaningful change had been long and hard and even dispiriting, some of the litigants said. But it was — eventually — worth it.
A veteran assistant U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, Michael J. Goldberger, whose office joined the lawsuit in 2009 on behalf of residents of the homes, told the court that the case was “one of the most remarkable experiences” of his career.
He said that near his desk, he had hung a framed page of testimony in the case offered several years ago by Ms. Vila. He read aloud from the transcript, in which Ms. Vila described what it was like to be abandoned in an adult home after a mental health crisis:
I miss my recliner where I used to sit in Sunnyside, Queens. I would sit, watch my TV, eat Chinese takeout food, and sit with my cats.
I miss cooking.
I miss skirt steak in my toaster oven.
I miss hot chocolate in my microwave.
I miss the spoonful of ice cream every now and then from my big fridge that I bought for myself.
I miss so many things.
I miss cut flowers that I could afford to buy every now and then.
There’s so many things that I miss, and it’s something that I want again.
With support, I think I can do that.
After Ms. Vila eventually moved to her own apartment because of the case, she texted Mr. Goldberger’s colleague a photo of a vase of flowers on her kitchen counter.
“We have managed to get people to understand the importance of treating individuals with the dignity that we are all entitled to,” Mr. Goldberger said.
State officials, who were defendants and have long come under harsh criticism for their oversight of adult homes, acknowledged that the case represented a milestone in the care of mentally ill people.
Dr. Ann Marie T. Sullivan, commissioner of the State Office of Mental Health, said the lawsuit has “awakened all of us to the need to be sure that individuals living with mental illness live as independently as possible.”
Then Judge Garaufis pointed to me in the audience.
“It’s extraordinarily essential that we understand the role of the Fourth Estate in making situations like this known to the public at large,” he said. “The New York Times dedicated tremendous resources to do so in the case of the seriously mentally ill. That’s a commitment to the community that goes unnoticed, usually, but should be heralded by all of us.”
I appreciated the judge’s remarks, but the truth is that I had not paid much attention to the case all these years. As journalists typically do, I had turned my attention elsewhere, becoming a correspondent in Russia, then an editor, then taking on a role as an executive on the company’s business side a couple of years ago.
My reporting had revealed something deeply troubling. It was up to others to step in.
Disorder and neglect
The courtroom scene would have been unimaginable during the year I spent reporting on the system.
The resulting three-part investigative series in The Times revealed a disturbing array of disorder and neglect at squalid adult homes, including countless deaths of residents that had never been reported to the state authorities.
At one home, with 325 beds, there was rampant falsification of records to cover up the failure to care for residents. Some were malnourished. Others went untreated and became suicidal.
At another home, corrupt doctors subjected dozens of residents to unnecessary prostate and eye surgeries.
The system of adult homes had sprung up in the wake of the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which led to the closing of large state psychiatric hospitals across the country.
A tenet of the movement was that with new medications and therapy, long-term psychiatric patients could be discharged from hospitals and lead independent lives.
But the grievous flaws in this approach became apparent in the coming decades. Across the country, psychiatric hospitals were emptied en masse, but officials at all levels had done little to prepare. The number of mentally ill homeless people grew shockingly high. Former psychiatric patients cycled in and out of jails and prisons.
In New York City, patients were often sent to adult homes, a system of last-resort flophouses. It was as if the psychiatric hospitals were being recreated, but in facilities without any of the mental health services.
After the investigative series was published in The Times, a group called Disability Advocates filed the lawsuit in 2003, saying that the reporting showed that the state was violating the Americans with Disabilities Act by unlawfully segregating people with severe mental illness in adult homes.
The lawsuit demanded that the state move residents to so-called supportive housing, where they could receive services in order to live independently, including counseling and help with shopping, cleaning, medication and personal care.
Judge Garaufis ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in 2009, but the decision was later vacated on procedural grounds. The two sides then reached a major settlement in 2013, under which the state would evaluate more than 4,000 mentally ill residents of adult homes in New York City to determine whether they could live independently and then find them supportive housing. The state pledged to effectively bar large adult homes from accepting people with severe mental illness.
It took a decade to reach the settlement, but even then, things did not go smoothly. State agencies were often at odds over how to put the settlement into place.
In 2017, it almost collapsed after Judge Garaufis accused the State Department of Health of conspiring with adult home operators to undermine enforcement of the state’s own regulations. He criticized the state for, at that point, having moved fewer than 500 mentally ill residents out of adult homes.
A year later, an investigation by ProPublica and the PBS series “Frontline,” in collaboration with The Times, raised questions about whether the state had failed to provide enough assistance to former adult home residents once they moved to supportive housing.
A court-appointed independent monitor, Clarence J. Sundram, recommended new safeguards to speed up the state’s evaluation of residents and transfer more out of the homes. That seemed to work, but the coronavirus pandemic caused more delays.
It was not until the last couple of years that enough progress had been made that Judge Garaufis was willing to consider ending the settlement agreement.
A room with a view
At the hearing on June 23 where the judge formally dismissed the case, Mr. Sundram said that about 1,300 mentally ill residents of the homes had been moved to supportive housing, out of the original settlement class of 4,000. Others had died, had left the homes on their own or had chosen to stay.
Of those in supportive housing, “the vast majority of them are doing well and are happy with the choice that they made,” Mr. Sundram said.
He hailed another pillar of the settlement: “closing the front door to new admissions of persons with serious mental illness” to large adult homes.
I spent the weeks after the court hearing retracing my reporting, interviewing some of the people I spoke with so many years ago and trying to understand how the system had changed.
The person I most wanted to reconnect with was George Gitlitz, a social worker who was a leader of the Coalition of Institutionalized, Aged and Disabled, which advocated for the rights of adult home residents at a time when government officials had all but abandoned them.
Mr. Gitlitz had devoted his life to the residents, spending countless hours a week in the homes, and was a crucial source for my reporting.
But he died several years ago, never to witness these changes.
The case “was historic,” Geoff Lieberman, the coalition’s former executive director, told me the other day. “It was the opportunity to correct misdirected, decades-old deinstitutionalization policies that trapped people in what were fundamentally segregated warehouses.”
A trade association representing adult homes said the class-action case “was incredibly challenging and unsettling,” but noted that some residents had chosen to stay. The association, as well as state officials, said the homes had transitioned to admitting elderly people, who were easier to care for.
A few weeks later, I went to visit Ms. Hunter, the former adult home resident who testified at the court hearing and serves as a peer advocate at the coalition.
She now lives in a supportive housing apartment in Far Rockaway, Queens, where she told me about her 11 years in an adult home.
“It was like a prison,” she said, recalling that when she first arrived, she was crammed into an airless room with two other women on a sweltering summer night.
In her apartment the other day, she walked from the kitchen, where she has hung colorful still lifes of food, over to a bedroom window. The view bolsters her spirits.
“I love looking at the ocean,” she said.
Back when I was reporting, I met countless people like Ms. Hunter at adult homes across New York City. My visits to the homes sometimes left me despondent: How had this been allowed to happen? Why wasn’t anyone doing anything about it?
I remember one day sitting in my car with my head in my hands after leaving an adult home in Queens. I had just reported on the gruesome death of an older woman named Muriel Sachs, who had been left alone in an unventilated room during a heat wave as temperatures hit 101 degrees. Workers had refused to check on her because the floor was stifling.
Nearly a quarter-century later, in that Brooklyn courtroom in June, the judge ended the two-hour proceeding by taking the unusual step of asking me to speak about my work.
I walked to the lectern, looked out at the audience of people who had made such a profound commitment to helping others and felt the weight of the moment.
The words would not come.
I paused and composed myself.
I recalled that in 2002, after the investigative series was published, prominent officials immediately responded by calling for change.
“Everyone said they would do something about it,” I told the court. “The Legislature, the governor, everyone said, ‘This cannot stand!’ And then, as so often happens, the world moved on.”
I gestured around the courtroom.
The people here, I said, did not move on.
Clifford J. Levy is deputy publisher and general manager of Wirecutter, The New York Times Company’s product recommendation site, and deputy publisher of The Athletic, the company’s sports site.
The post My Reporting Led to a Landmark Lawsuit. The Case Took 22 Years. appeared first on New York Times.
