A federal appeals court ruled today the state Department of Corrections has to provide hormone treatments to a person it's holding indefinitely as sexually dangerous.
Sandy Battista's request for female hormones has dragged on for more than 15 years now.
Battista, born David Megarry, suffers from gender identity disorder. The corrections department now acknowledges that, but says giving her female hormones would endanger her by making her more attractive to the male sex offenders at the Massachusetts Treatment Center for Sexually Dangerous Persons, where Battista was committed in 2003 after his criminal sentence for child rape, kidnapping and robbery ran out. In 2005, Battista tried to remove her genitals with a razor blade.
The Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston blasted the "delays, poor explanations, missteps, changes in position and rigidities - common enough in bureaucratic regimes but here taken to an extreme" and said enough's enough:
It has been fifteen years since Battista first asked for treatment, and for ten years, health professionals have been recommending hormone therapy as a necessary part of the treatment. When during the delay Battista sought to mutilate herself, the Department could be said to have known that Battista was in "substantial risk of serious harm." ...
Initially, the district judge was far from anxious to grant the relief sought. It was only after what the judge perceived to be a pattern of delays, new objections substituted for old ones, misinformation and other negatives that he finally concluded that he could not trust the defendants in this instance. The details are laid out in his oral opinion and the record contains support for his conclusion.
