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The U.S. Supreme Court's decision was hailed by Kansas and the 38 other states that had urged the justices to uphold the law. However, defense lawyers, civil libertarians, and mental health professionals warned that the decision might allow states to lock up convicts who are not truly dangerous to society. In effect, said several mental health experts, the ruling misuses mental hospitals for punishment purposes, singling out one category of violent criminal for unlimited incarceration without the safeguards afforded to criminal defendants in the bill of rights. Dissenting justices echoed these sentiments in Hendricks, writing that while they agreed in principle with idea that states may confine sexual predators who are deemed to be mentally abnormal, in this case it appeared that Kansas had not tried to treat the mental problems of the convict whose case was before the court. As a result, they wrote, his institutionalization functioned more like a punishment, and therefore it was unconstitutional.
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