Can/should they get away with this? Sounds to me like the county was being negligent.
I’m pretty sure municipal corporations like counties are not generally entitled to sovereign immunity. But I’ll defer to the law-talking guys on that one.
I have no opinon on sovereign immunity for county entities. However,
In what way were they negligent, in your view?
From the article, it appears they arrested this woman on some outstanding warrants. Prior to her arrest, she had (voluntarily) ingested large amounts of illegal drugs.
Yet
They monitored her, and medicated her, but she OD’ed anyway. Where do you see negligence?
Regards,
Shodan
You may be right here. Negligence is a different issue, with which I muddied the waters. I guess my question had more to do with “sovereign immunity,” which sounds like they could claim that for any lawsuit, irrespective of merit.
Myself, I don’t know anything about what happened beyond what was in the article. But if I were tasked with determining whether they were negligent or not, I would first try to determine what the appropriate treatment would be for a person who came in with the dead woman’s symptoms. Given that she died, I suspect that leaving her alone in a cell might have been an insufficient level of care.
AFAICT counties in the US do not have sovereign immunity, which is only for the federal or state governments.
It sounds more that “qualified immunity” is at play here, since the article to which you linked mentioned specifically that it had been found that no criminal law was violated.
IANAL.
Regards,
Shodan
How about if, instead of leaving her alone, a nurse monitored her continuously and administered medication as appropriate?
Regards,
Shodan
It would depend on what was meant by “continuously” and also whether continuous monitoring with a one-time administration of medication is sufficient.
The reason I wonder about what continuous means here is that the article says the woman was “found unresponsive in her Sebastian County Detention Center cell.” That implies to me the monitoring was more periodic than continuous. Otherwise they would have witnessed her becoming unresponsive instead of finding her in such a state. I also wouldn’t accept proof that she was continuously monitored by a nurse as enough to demonstrate lack of negligence because it’s possible that if she were sent to a hospital, the hospital would have more resources to determine what was wrong with the woman and give her a better shot at surviving.
People die while incarcerated, no one knows that better than I do. I’ve had my patients die in prison, and I’ve sat in on hundreds of mortality reviews for patients who have died in prison, in my capacity as a Medical Director. Sometimes we find things that should definitely have been done differently, most times we find the death was not reasonably preventable, often it was inevitable no matter what would have been done.
Frequently, people come in to prison, they get health screening visit with a nurse, they tell us they’re not taking drugs or alcohol and they have no health problems or concerns. Their vital signs are great, so they are put in a cell. In each cell is a button or signal with which they can notify the guards if they have problems. Despite this, we can find them dead in a cell.
“Sovereign Immunity” sounds like a silly defense, though. I don’t believe we’ve used it during my tenure with Corrections, in response to lawsuits. But I’d have to check with the lawyers to be sure.