Jordan Arthur Bloom v. Inova Health System, et al.

This case arises from the involuntary civil commitment of a voluntarily admitted psychiatric patient, and from the subsequent, and total, foreclosure of any judicial forum — state or federal — in which he could test the lawfulness of that commitment. The Supreme Court of Virginia dismissed Petitioner's petition for appeal without reaching the merits, on the ground that he had not filed a separate notice of appeal with the clerk of the Court of Appeals of Virginia, even though he timely filed his petition for appeal with the Supreme Court of Virginia itself and the intermediate court's order never advised him — a prose litigant — that a separate filing was required. The questions presented are:

1. Whether a state supreme court's dismissal of a prose litigant's petition for appeal, for failure to make a second, distinct filing with a different clerk's office of which he was never notified by any court or rule communicated to him, rests on a state procedural ground that is “adequate” within the meaning of this Court's independent-and-adequate-state-ground doctrine, or whether the unforeseeable and unannounced nature of the requirement, as applied, renders the ground inadequate to bar this Court's review of the federal question presented below.

2. Whether the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause is violated when a State (a) permits a hospital to continue the confinement of a voluntarily admitted psychiatric patient through a temporary detention order obtained on the sworn statement of a substitute petitioner rather than the treating facility itself, (b) never notifies the confined patient of any right to appeal that confinement while he remains confined, and (c) thereafter forecloses all civil remedies for the confinement, in perpetuity, on the ground that the patient did not challenge the order during the very confinement he had no ability to appeal.