Health Official Ordered To Stay At Retarded Center

A federal judge has ordered Tennessee’s mental health commissioner to spend weekends at a state institution for the retarded where he says patients are dying of neglect.

“I’m terribly frustrated and terribly tired of this pass-the-buck job that you’ve done,” an angry U.S. District Judge Jon McCalla told Marjorie Nelle Cardwell.

McCalla ordered Cardwell to spend every fourth weekend at the center, beginning Friday, and imposed a $5,000-a-day fine until the state cleans up the problems.

The Arlington Developmental Center houses residents with serious physical and mental handicaps. Some patients cannot eat or sit up by themselves.

McCalla had ordered sweeping improvements back in 1993, when he determined that care was so bad that patients’ lives were endangered and their civil rights violated.

Cardwell, whose own 44-year-old son is retarded, decided Thursday not to fight the punishment. But she complained that the judge is holding her personally responsible, and noted that his order will prevent her from seeing her son at her home.

As of July, 11 residents of the 400-bed institution had died in the previous 10 months, about twice the expected rate.

In March, two former employees were charged with murder in the beating death of a center resident. Five former center workers were charged in May with physically assaulting two center residents in two separate incidents last year.