Panel: Missouri not violating voting rights of mentally ill

ST. LOUIS -- A three-judge federal appeals panel -- one that included retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor -- has ruled against an advocacy agency and a Kansas City man who felt the state denied voting rights to certain mentally ill people.

Robert Scaletty and Missouri Protection and Advocacy Services sued Missouri's secretary of state and attorney general after Scaletty was told he could not vote in an election. Scaletty has paranoid schizophrenia.

A lawyer for the plaintiffs, Samuel Bagenstos, argued the Missouri Constitution and state law denied voting rights to Missourians assigned a guardian because of mental incapacity. He asked the panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to declare what he called a voting ban unconstitutional and in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The court did not do so.

Bagenstos said Friday that while the ruling was not what he sought, it helped clear up confusion about the law as it relates to the mentally ill and voting in Missouri.

Attorney General Jay Nixon's office did not immediately comment.

Secretary of State Robin Carnahan's office said systems are already in place to evaluate the mentally ill under guardianship and whether or not they can vote. Officials there did not expect any changes to come as a result of the case.

Scaletty had been declared incapacitated -- meaning he can't care for himself -- but found fit to vote.

But in 2004, the Kansas City Election Board told him he could not vote because he was under a court's guardianship order.

"This action was obviously a mistake, because it was contrary to the right to vote expressly preserved in Scaletty's guardianship order," the judges wrote in Thursday's ruling.

The Election Board corrected the error in 2005 and issued Scaletty a voter ID card. Bagenstos said Scaletty didn't get his voter registration card until after he filed the lawsuit, so that in itself didn't resolve the legal issues.

But, "As state law required them to obey that court order, there is no reasonable expectation that their 2004 error will be repeated," the judges wrote.

They also found the advocacy agency lacked standing to be a party in the suit.

U.S. district judge Ortrie Smith previously ruled that because state law provides for people in guardianship such individual assessments for competency to vote, there is no blanket denial of voting rights for those with guardians.

O'Connor, 76, left the Supreme Court in January 2006 as the nation's first female justice. Appeals Court Chief Judge James Loken extended an invitation to her last year to serve as a visiting judge on the appeals court. Typically through the course of a year, the St. Louis-based appeals court may use four or five visiting judges.