Should you sign a voluntary admission agreement if you’ve been promised that you’ll be released if you do so?

Hello, everyone. Its Mark and welcome back. In this video, I want to talk to you about the voluntary admission agreement and whether or not you should sign it. If you’ve been promised that once you do so, you’ll be released the next day or even the same day. And so I’ve seen a lot of this is where somebody gets detained at a Baker Act facility and the facility says, well, listen, if you agree to stay voluntarily and sign this agreement, we’ll let you out by the end of the day or we’ll let you out.

And then they call me and say, well, we don’t need a lawyer because, well, we’ve signed a voluntary admission agreement and they’re going to let us out today or tomorrow. And they say, should we be concerned? And my answer is absolutely, you should be concerned. And not only should you be concerned, you shouldn’t sign it. I would never counsel a client to sign a voluntary admission agreement with one exception.

And that is the facility sends me an email or sends me a letter or some kind of communication in writing confirming that if the client signs a voluntary admission agreement, they will be released within a certain period of time. And that has only happened one time. In all the probably over 100 plus cases that we filed and the thousands of people we’ve spoken to have I ever counseled anybody to agree to voluntary admission. And so what tends to happen is if somebody gets taken to a Baker Act facility and they are either coerced or they are tricked into signing this voluntary admission agreement. And the reason the facilities do that is because then they don’t have to go to court and get a court order to keep you.

In other words, they are circumventing the requirements of due process that are contained within the Baker Act statute. So if your loved one or you are at a facility do not ever agree to sign a voluntary admission agreement, and Moreover, you got to fight to get out, which is why I have said in previous videos and I say it in this video that in these cases, time is of the essence. The longer you wait to take action, the more likely you’re there and going to be stuck there. So time is of the essence. Move quickly.

And that’s what we specialize in. Thanks for tuning in. See you in the next video. Bye.