Last week, a 31-year-old woman died inside Multnomah County’s jail in Downtown Portland. The seven-month stint without a jail death was an improvement from 2023 when 10 inmates/detainees died inside the county’s lockups. Even so, too many people are dying behind bars due to preventable reasons. Sometimes it is a lack of mental illness care, a failure to limit access to dangerous drugs, or untreated (or improperly treated) alcohol or drug withdrawal. When these deaths are the result of a failure to provide reasonably appropriate medical care and treatment, they may represent a violation of that person’s constitutional rights. For reliable answers about civil actions based on this type of constitutional rights violation, turn to an Oregon civil rights lawyer with experience handling cases involving jail deaths.
Although the reports that the news media have published so far provide only sparse details, the basic factual pattern of the most recent death is a very familiar one. Multnomah County Sheriff’s officers arrested the woman on Tuesday, July 22, charging her with criminal mischief and reckless burning. According to a Willamette Week report, her decade-long history of “run-ins with police” were “often the result of poverty or mental illness.”
Less than 72 hours after her July 22 arrest, the woman was found unresponsive inside her jail cell. Paramedics failed to revive her.
On July 2, the Sheriff’s Office released a Technical Assistance report from the National Institute of Corrections (NIC) entitled “Contraband Mitigation Assessment.” The report, which looked at conditions inside the jail, found that contraband – especially drugs — inside the jails was a serious problem. Of the 10 deaths in 2023, four were overdose incidents. Three more were suicides.
The calls for change come from more than just the families of the deceased detainees. In April, the Oregon Nurses Association called for the removal of multiple health officials at the jail, including the Corrections Health Director. The association highlighted numerous “serious health care and operational issues,” and demanded improved safety and staffing.
People inside lockups are entitled to reasonably appropriate medical care and reasonable safety.
When that does not happen, harm, which is often fatal, results. As noted above, no one had died at the Multnomah County Jail before the woman who passed on July 25. However, the NIC report found that, during the first six months of 2024, the jail experienced 15 incidents where people in custody overdosed so severely that they required transportation and treatment at a nearby emergency room.
Proving Jail Staff Knew or Should Have Known About the Problem
In these types of civil rights cases, the law holds authorities (or the third parties acting on their behalf) responsible for what they knew or reasonably should have known. So, for example, if a detainee personally informs officers during his booking that he is in the process of detoxing off opioids, that jail’s staff are responsible for providing him with reasonably appropriate withdrawal treatment and care. If they do nothing and he dies from the impacts of his withdrawal, they have potentially violated his civil rights. Even if an individual officer or healthcare worker did not personally know, the jail is still “on notice” of the issue because the detainee told the deputy at the booking desk.
Similarly, if an arrested individual is designated as a suicide risk but the staff places her in a cell where she has access to what the State of Oregon labels “items that pose a threat to self-harm” and where she is not under appropriate observation, then her suicide inside her cell may represent civilly culpable negligence by the jail staff. The State of Oregon demands that inmates under “high risk” suicide watch receive “continuous and unobstructed one-to-one observation at all times,” complete with recorded observations every 15 minutes. “Moderate risk” requires “unobstructed one-to-one observation of the inmate at staggered intervals, not to exceed 15 minutes.”
Too many times, that does not happen. In one example, a New Jersey man died inside his cell by hanging. The man was on a level of suicide watch that required observation every 15 minutes but, according to his family’s civil rights lawsuit, was not observed with that degree of frequency. Part of the family’s lawsuit alleged that officers failed to make these observations and then simply entered false entries into logbooks. The lawsuit also asserted that the warden knew about this “perennial problem,” but jail supervisors rarely or never reprimanded officers for doing so. The parties eventually settled the case in 2022 after the county, while not admitting wrongdoing, made a sizable payment to the man’s estate.
People behind bars – some of them placed there for transgressions as minor as missing a court date – are dying because they are not receiving basic health care. Even when issues of inadequate care present themselves, winning a civil rights case is challenging. These lawsuits are nuanced and complex, with the law imposing substantial demands on the plaintiffs. The knowledgeable Oregon jail death attorneys at Kaplan Law LLC have specialized knowledge and direct experience needed for cases like these. Our diligent team will work to get to the bottom of what happened and then provide you with the legal information and advice you need to decide how to proceed. To learn more, call (503) 226-3844 today or contact us online to set up your free consultation.