An inmate dies on the floor after suffering from withdrawal. Should the jail pay?
James Allen Hatcher, a 38-year-old surgical assistant, was booked into the Louisville jail on Feb. 21, 2008, on a charge of civil contempt for failure to pay child support.
Hatcher was dead less than 24 hours later. He went into “severe medical distress” as he suffered from alcohol withdrawal. Rather than call a doctor or send Hatcher to the hospital, jail officials stuck him in an isolation cell, where he eventually was found on the floor with purplish-blue extremities, eyes bulging, heart stopped.
On Wednesday, Hatcher’s two daughters will ask the Kentucky Supreme Court to let them hold the Louisville Metro Government and Tom Campbell, the jail’s former director, responsible for his death in light of a state law requiring humane treatment of jail inmates.
In a lawsuit that has spent a dozen years winding through the state and federal courts, the family is asking for more than $1 million in damages. The city agreed in 2016 to pay $45,000 to Hatcher’s estate to settle the suit’s claims against two individual corrections officers, Wayne Mumford and Edward Dugan.
The stakes could be high for jails across Kentucky — and ultimately, for local taxpayers — depending on how broadly the Supreme Court rules, said Andrew Horne, the lawyer representing Hatcher’s estate.
It’s common for newly booked jail inmates suffering alcohol or drug withdrawal simply to be tossed into a small concrete “detox cell,” Horne said. Sometimes the inmates endure and other times, as with Hatcher, they don’t, he said.
“The nurses just let him lay there. The corrections officers didn’t step up because they thought, ‘Oh, he’s just detoxing.’ What they needed to do was get him to a doctor right away,” Horne said in an interview this week. “There’s potential, with a broader ruling, that you could see lawsuits like this all over the commonwealth.”
Prescription drugs such as Librium treat acute alcohol withdrawal, Horne said. But the Louisville jail had a policy denying inmates access to “dependency-producing medication” that can treat various medical problems, such as withdrawal, even if the drugs were prescribed by inmates’ personal doctors, he said.
“I don’t know exactly what a doctor would have done for Mr. Hatcher because he never got to see one,” Horne said.
“He comes in there, and within a few minutes, there is a severe change in his psychological profile,” Horne said. “He goes from talking normally with everyone to playing dodge ball with an invisible friend to being on fire to bees stinging him all over his body. He’s really having delusions. Such an abrupt change in mental status is a sign of a physical problem. My expert says he should have seen a doctor.”
The Louisville jail’s current director, Dwayne Clark, did not respond to requests this week to comment for this story. Clark was hired last year and is not named in the lawsuit.
In its written arguments to the Supreme Court, the jail did not dispute that Hatcher died in its custody. But it said the Hatcher family’s claims are barred by official immunity and sovereign immunity, legal protections that make it difficult for people to sue governments and their employees.
Also, there was not enough time for corrections staff to respond to Hatcher’s rapidly deteriorating health, the jail said in its written brief.
“Hatcher’s misfortune was that his symptoms and death all occurred overnight and in less than eight hours,” the jail wrote in its brief. “Hatcher was scheduled to be seen in the morning sick call.”
The Kentucky Court of Appeals ruled against Hatcher’s family in 2018, finding that Louisville and Campbell were entitled to governmental immunity from the claims.
Jails often get inmates with serious alcohol and drug addictions, and if those inmates stay long enough, the jails have to deal with the sometimes fatal health complications of withdrawal, including nausea, depression, seizures, delusions and high blood pressure.
From 2011 to 2019, jails, prisons and their private health care contractors paid more than $70 million in wrongful death lawsuit settlements for inmates who died while withdrawing from alcohol and drugs in custody, according to Massachusetts-based Advocates for Human Potential, which advises public officials on correctional policy.
That group worked with the National Sheriffs’ Association two years ago to craft guidelines for jails dealing with addicted inmates. During the intake process, inmates should be screened for signs of addiction and withdrawal, according to the guidelines. Certain medications can ease withdrawal symptoms when administered under the supervision of trained medical personnel, the group said.
“Although deaths from inadequately treated withdrawal are uncommon, such deaths are on the rise,” the group wrote in its guidelines. “Medically managed withdrawal is not treatment and relapse is likely to occur without long-term follow-up services, (but) assisting individuals in custody who are withdrawing from substances is an ethical and medical responsibility.”
In an investigation of Hatcher’s death prepared for Horne, prison consultant E. Eugene Miller wrote that Hatcher was booked into a holding cell at 11:28 a.m. Within a few hours, he was pale and shaking, and as his behavior grew stranger, a nurse had him transferred to the jail’s mental health unit at 4:57 p.m.
By 5:25 p.m., Hatcher was acting “so bizarre” that he was placed alone in an isolation cell. Corrections officers “started laughing at the guy” and “kind of shunned him off,” according to follow-up interviews with witnesses by the jail’s public integrity unit. At one point, Hatcher shoved his clothing through the slot in his cell’s door.
At 7:25 a.m. the next day, a corrections officer observed Hatcher “in obvious distress” and told another officer, who summoned a nurse about 15 minutes later, Miller wrote. But the nurse did not arrive at Hatcher’s isolation cell until 7:58 a.m., “too late to save Mr. Hatcher’s life,” Miller wrote.
“All told, it took approximately 33 minutes from the time when Officer Dugan said that he realized that Mr. Hatcher had a serious medical problem to the time when Nurse Hatcher came to his cell,” Miller wrote. “In essence, the officers deliberately chose to ignore the urgency of Mr. Hatcher’s obviously deteriorating medical condition and critical need for help. They took their time in notifying a nurse and then, in effect, shrugged their shoulders.”
Hatcher was having withdrawal-related seizures until a heart attack finally killed him, Horne said.
“They dispute that,” Horne said. “They’re saying, ‘His heart stopped.’ And our response is, ‘Well, yes, that’s what happens when you die, your heart does stop.’ But it didn’t just stop for no reason. Things happened before that.”
