County Jails must pay for mental illness drugs
June 28, 2004
County jails must pay for mental illness drugs
------------------------------------------------------------------------
By CHARLES WOLFEAssociated Press
About Top Jobs
FRANKFORT, Ky. - County jails, not the state, must bear the cost of drugs for treating indigent inmates with mental illness, the Kentucky Court of Appeals said yesterday.
The ruling came in a case by Daviess County and its jailer, David Osborne, who contended that the state should pay for "psychotropic" medications.
They based their claim on a 1986 statute that said, "it shall be the responsibility of the commonwealth" to provide psychiatric "evaluation, treatment or services" at a facility that is funded or operated by the state.
A statute adopted four years earlier specified that jails were to pay the cost of "medical, dental and psychological care for indigent prisoners."
Osborne and Daviess County argued that the statutes conflicted, so the second implicitly repealed the first. A judge in Franklin County Circuit Court disagreed, as did the appeals panel.
Writing for the court, Judge David C. Buckingham of Murray said a distinction could be made between "psychological care" and "evaluation, treatment or services," so the two laws could be read together.
Judge John Minton of Bowling Green and Special Judge John D. Miller of Owensboro concurred.