Jeff Wiehe, writing for the Journal Gazette, has an interesting story about a woman who died in the county jail after being arrested for DUI. Her BAC was .33 and she apparently had significant problems with alcohol. Much of the story addresses complaints by her family out of Tennessee about her treatment at the jail – they think she should have received more medical treatment; and the manner in which her body was stored – they picked her up from a funeral home garage. The funeral home said her body had been there for about 20 minutes and was placed there specifically so the family could pick it up.
It’s always a fools game to pretend you know enough about a situation from a newspaper article to really judge it appropriately. (Again: not stopping me). But, from what I read, the family’s attitude annoys me. They apparently were not doing the hard work of getting this woman back on the straight and narrow. She was drinking heavily and apparently hadn’t had a paying job in years. That’s no what I’m judging, however. Every family has to go its own way, and just because you share parents doesn’t necessarily make you responsible for a person who has gone off the rails.
But, living in that sort of glass house, you shouldn’t be casting stones at the county government or the people who are charged with cleaning up. Government has about a million demands on its limited dollars. It’s pretty easy to second guess, but how much funding would it take to keep up with all of the psychological and medical demands of every person arrested on drug and alcohol related charges? These are jails, not hospitals and not mental health institutions. And yet, our corrections system ends up being the provider of last resort.
Anyway, from the article, it looks like the family is showing up after the fact and saying “you should’ve done better.” Government having deep pockets, I suspect Allen County will get slapped with a lawsuit of some sort for its trouble.
[Actually, on the topic of expectations that government do everything for everybody without raising taxes, I was suddenly reminded of the Simpson’s episode where Homer was elected to run Springfield’s Sanitation Department]
“BAC = 0.25 to 0.40%
Risk of death is very high due to alcohol poisoning and/or pulmonary aspiration of vomit while unconscious.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-term_effects_of_alcohol
To me, it makes sense that anyone arrested within this range of BAC, should be hospitalized first and sent to jail second.
From the story, it looks like she was taken to the hospital first.
Thanks for that information, Doug. Should have read the article first. ;) My question then becomes, why was she released from the hospital? When was the blood alcohol test taken? A BAC reading only measures blood alcohol content at a moment in time. Did her BAC continue to rise after it was initially taken? As a juror, these would be things I’d be interested in hearing before I made any decisions about fault. Maybe the family would do better to sue the hospital as opposed to the jail? The woman doing the drinking certainly is at least 50% at fault.
Geoffrey Fieger took a case to trial against St. Joseph County, various individual deputy sheriffs and the Sheriff’s contracted health care contractor provider in federal court (in front of Judge Sharpe) about 8 years (?) ago involving the jail’s treatment of someone arrested for alcohol related offense. County got out of lawsuit. Health care contractor provider settled about the third day of trial. At least one of the deputies got a hung jury, two other deputies suffered $ 56 million adverse (mostly punitive damages) verdict. The 7th Circuit has rebuffed at least 2 attempts to somehow get the County to be liable. Ultimately, the “hung jury” deputy on re-trial was found not liable. Off the top of my head, the decveased’s name was “Moreland” ??
Yup, it’s the Estate of Moreland. The facts of that case are just horrible. Basically, the correctional officers beat the guy and left him to die if I recall correctly.
The 7th Circuit just ruled most recently that Indiana’s current civil rights claims statute is subject to the same cap as other tort claims (currently $700,000, I believe.) Beyond that, it’s discretionary with the governmental entity to pay for a judgment against one of its employees for a civil rights violation. (The rule in effect at the time of the Moreland beatings did not require a governmental entity to pay anything for a civil rights judgment against an employee).
For an ordinary tort, because of how the tort claims act is structured, the judgment is going to be against the governmental entity, and not the employee, so the entity has to pay that judgment. But, it’s still subject to the judgment cap.
One has to wonder why the woman was released from the hospital, but we don’t have all the facts, so I hate to point fingers in any direction.
Also, we don’t know what the family may have tried to do to get the woman back on track. If she wasn’t open to or accepting of treatment, and if they could not keep her under watch for 24 hours a day, what more could they have done?