Gov recalls notorious case from the 1980s

Gov. Cuomo on Monday compared the man caught snoozing under subway seats to one of the most infamous homeless people in city history.

“You do not help a homeless person by saying we’ll let you sleep on the train. That’s not how you help a homeless person,” he told NY1. “That’s Billie Boggs from 50 years ago.”

Joyce Patricia Brown (above), who renamed herself Billie Boggs, was a mentally ill woman who once terrorized a stretch of the Upper East Side by defecating on sidewalks and slinging insults at passers-by.

In 1987, she was involuntarily committed to Bellevue Hospital under a program started by Mayor Ed Koch that aimed at taking disturbed and potentially dangerous people off the streets.

The New York Civil Liberties Union took the city to court over her commitment, and she was eventually released after a state judge decided she couldn’t be treated with anti-psychotic drugs against her will.

Following the ruling, mentally ill homeless people who would not accept help were often charged with misdemeanors and incarcerated rather than receiving psychiatric care.

Brown eventually turned herself around, temporarily filling in as a secretary at the NYCLU and later giving a talk at Harvard titled “The Homeless Crisis: A Street View” in 1988.

A roommate at the time, however, told The New York Times that Boggs still showed signs of her schizophrenia, including mumbling racial epithets to herself. Boggs denied the account.

She died in 2005.