by Douglas Ankney
A review of court records by PLN has found repeated sanctions for discovery violations against private prison healthcare provider Wellpath in suits across the country blaming the firm’s dismal care for prisoner deaths – including four since 2020.
Washington – Benton County Jail
First, the firm was twice sanctioned in a suit alleging that the death of Marc Moreno at Washington’s Benton County Jail was caused by employees of a Wellpath corporate predecessor, Correctional Healthcare Companies (CHC).
Plaintiffs sought discovery in 2018 of documents related to prior complaints about healthcare at the jail, as well as audits of the jail’s medical services and electronically stored information (ESI). The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington granted a motion to compel discovery on April 9, 2019, giving Wellpath 14 days to comply. But months later, on January 8, 2020, the Court found CHC in contempt of its earlier order, and it levied a sanction for $7,290 in fees to pay Plaintiff’s attorneys from Budge & Heipt PLLC in Seattle and the Law Office of George Trejo in Yakima. CHC was also ordered to execute a search plan to locate the missing ESI, including emails of all ...
by Kevin W. Bliss
New Mexico’s Bernalillo County is terminating the contract with its jail’s private healthcare contractor effective July 25, 2023. County Manager Julie Morgas Baca sent word to YesCare – the corporate descendant of Corizon Health – on January 26, 2023, pulling the plug two years early on a $64.9 million four-year contract that began in September 2021.
It is the second contract canceled in two years with a healthcare contractor at the county’s Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Albuquerque. When county commissioners voted to hire YesCare, it was because previous provider Centurion Detention Health Services had quit in a firestorm that followed nine jail deaths in just one year.
Tennessee-based YesCare is the golem Corizon Health brought to life with much of the firm’s viable business when it successfully petitioned a Texas court to let it slough off its liabilities into another new corporation called Tehum Care Services. That firm then promptly declared bankruptcy. Known as the “Texas Two-Step,” the procedure is legal but ethically dubious; Tehum told the federal bankruptcy court for the Southern District of Texas in May 2023 that it had 30 unsecured creditors owed a total of $38,438,751. See: In Re: Tehum Care ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
Dexter Barry, 54, waited 12 years to receive a new heart. He even moved to Jacksonville to receive the life-saving transplant in 2020. In just two days in late November 2022, however, a stay in the Duval County Jail (DCJ) undid the miraculous $4-million surgery when Barry was denied the medication needed to keep his body from rejecting the new heart, and it failed.
Barry had argued with a disabled neighbor on November 18, 2022, over a shared wi-fi plan the neighbor was not paying for. The neighbor called police, claiming Barry verbally threatened him. The respondin officer said, “I’m just going to separate you all for a cool-off period,” and he arrested Barry on a simple misdemeanor assault charge for threatening violence. During the arrest Barry told officers seven times about his heart transplant and the dire need to take the anti-transplant rejection drug.
The next two days he spent in DCJ under the care of its private contracted healthcare provider, Armor Correctional Services. That turned into a death sentence that within a week left the soon-to-be grandfather dead from cardiac arrest. A pathologist hired by his family confirmed he died because his body rejected ...
by Keith Sanders
On January 19, 2023, Corrections Minister Enver Erdogan announced that the Australian state of Victoria is booting the private healthcare contractor from the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre (DPFC). Effective July 1, 2023, Wellpath subsidiary Correct Care Australasia (CCA) will be replaced by the state-owned Western Health to provide healthcare. The change will affect not only the 538 women held at the prison but as many as 78 more held at the minimum-security Tarrengower prison, also in Victoria.
The announcement came just over three years after an indigenous prisoner was found dead in her cell at DPFC. Veronica Nelson died on January 2, 2020, after calling for help on the prison intercom system 49 times as she suffered from an undiagnosed medical condition and heroin withdrawal. After staff finally answered, a CCA doctor refused to send Nelson to a hospital, according to testimony from prison nurse Stephanie Hills.
Nelson was arrested on shoplifting and bail violation charges on December 30, 2019. An outside investigation conducted after her death found that no one checked on her as her symptoms worsened. A prison guard lied to Nelson “several times about calling for a nurse on her behalf,” the investigation found. ...
by K. Robert Schaeffer
On October 7, 2022, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee granted judgment on the pleadings to Rutherford County and VendEngine, Inc., the contractor that digitizes prisoner mail in its jail, in a suit filed by Smart Communications that alleged infringement of its patented rival digitization service, MailGuard. In its decision, the Court found the MailGuard patent “invalid because it is not directed to patent-eligible subject matter.” See: HLFIP Holding, Inc. v. Rutherford Cty., 2022 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 184056 (M.D. Tenn.).
The decision mirrors an earlier ruling by the federal court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, which also decided that MailGuard was “patent ineligible” on April 22, 2022. In that case, Smart Communications sued the York County Prison for engaging rival mail-scanning service TextBehind, claiming its service infringed on the MailGuard patent.
Smart Communications, founded and run by CEO Jon Logan, emerged on the prison industrial landscape in 2009 primarily as a provider of electronic messaging to county jails. Since then it has expanded its communications service offerings to include phone calls, virtual visits, tablets, kiosks, digital media – and scanning incoming mail, ostensibly to prevent the introduction of contraband.
The ...
by Eike Blohm, MD
After a 2019 incident during which a prisoner gave birth in her cell – delivering a baby into the toilet while guards ignored her cries for help – Arizona’s Perryville Prison in Buckeye started inducing labor for pregnant prisoners.
Inducing labor involves intravenous administration of drugs that cause uterine contractions. These contractions can be more painful than those of spontaneous labor and carry a higher risk of soft tissue tears. NaphCare, the Alabama-based private firm that holds the contract to provide healthcare for the state Department of Corrections (DOC), told the Arizona Republic it had no such policy. So this apparently happened before DOC dropped its former private healthcare contractor, Centurion, at the end of September 2022. [See: PLN, Dec. 2022, p.1]
An investigation by the news outlet revealed that three women were induced against their will at Perryville. While the procedure is generally safe for mother and baby at full term – typically 40 weeks – doing so before 38 weeks is reserved for high-risk pregnancies, such as when a woman suffers from diabetes or pre-eclampsia. Yet two of the deliveries at Perryville were induced at 37 weeks, both in the absence of medical ...
by Casey J. Bastian
On May 31, 2022, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of Illinois awarded attorney’s fees and costs totaling $17,449.90 to a state prisoner who earlier convinced a jury that a prison nurse’s dilly-dallying deprived him of prescribed physical therapy. For unnecessary pain and suffering that resulted, the jury had awarded Andrew D. Coe a total of $25,000 in damages on March 2, 2022.
Coe was housed at the Danville Correctional Center (DCC) operated by the Illinois Department of Corrections (DOC) in 2017. On June 27, 2017, Coe was to be provided three months of physical therapy for treatment of a back injury sustained in an automobile accident prior to incarceration.
Dr. Justin Young prescribed the treatment and directed a nurse to provide Coe with a “10-day medical permit card for physical therapy for Monday’s, Wednesday’s, and Friday’s at 4:00 p.m.” Immediately thereafter, nurse Elicia Pearson assumed control of issuing Coe’s medical permit card. Pearson instructed Coe to wait in the healthcare unit waiting area to allow her time to prepare and issue the card.
Approximately 30 minutes later, Pearson stated to Coe that she was too busy right then to process the card, but ...
by Chuck Sharman
In a statement to a local Jacksonville news station on June 6, 2023, the healthcare provider for at the Duval County Jail denied wrongdoing in the death of a former detainee who missed critical doses of drugs to prevent rejection of his transplanted heart. Instead, Armor Correctional Healthcare Services insisted to NPR affiliate WGCU that other factors were to blame for the death of Dexter Barry on November 23, 2022. It also said that the 54-year-old’s medication was ordered and did not arrive on time.
Barry’s family and their attorney, Andrew Bonderud, noted that Barry took his anti-rejection medication three times a day. Consequently, he would have missed at least five doses during the two days he spent in the jail after Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office (JSO) Deputy Jacob McKeon arrested Barry on November 18, 2023. He was released two days later. He died three days after that when his heart stopped.
An autopsy conducted for his family concluded that his fatal cardiac arrest likely resulted from a severe autoimmune reaction to his transplanted heart. But Dr. Jose SuarezHoyos added, “As a general pathologist, I do not feel qualified to give a professional opinion as to the effect ...
by Jacob Barrett
On December 5, 2022, a jury in federal court for the Western District of Michigan awarded $6.4 million to the estate of Wade Jones, 40, who was left to die from untreated alcohol withdrawal in his cell at Michigan’s Kent County Correctional Facility (KCCF) by guards and staff with Corizon Health, Inc., the jail’s privately contracted healthcare provider. However, the award has been jeopardized by the pending bankruptcy of Corizon Health’s corporate descendant. [See: PLN, Mar. 2023, p.56.]
Jones was detained and given a misdemeanor citation for shoplifting and retail fraud after stealing several bottles of liquor on April 13, 2018. He appeared for his arraignment 15 days later, and the trial judge directed Jones to speak with probation officer Deven Bonham prior to sentencing. He then consented to a portable breath test (PBT) which registered his Blood Alcohol Content at 0.159 the first time and 0.145 ten minutes later – well in excess of the 0.08 limit. Jones admitted he had “a couple drinks” before the hearing. Bonham informed the court that she was shocked at Jones’ PBT because he seemed functional. The trial judge also noted Jones had a “developed tolerance.” The court subsequently ...
by Matt Clarke
On July 22, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reinstated claims previously dismissed in a lawsuit filed over a detainee’s fatal beating at a prison privately operated by LaSalle Management Co. for the city of Monroe, Louisiana.
Monroe ceased leasing beds from LaSalle at Richwood Correctional Center (RCC) in 2019. But when cops arrested Erie Moore, Sr., on October 12, 2015, he was booked into the lockup on a charge of disturbing the peace. Moore was agitated and noncompliant during booking, so duty nurse William Mitchell did not complete the medical part of the intake process before Moore was placed in a lockdown cell.
Shift supervisor Gerald Hardwell then placed another combative detainee in the same cell, with predictable results: The two men began fighting. Soon Moore’s cellmate, Vernon White, 28, lay dying on the floor. Moore ignored the commands of guards sent to extract White’s unconscious body until guard Christopher Loring pepper sprayed him in the face and guard Jeremy Runner struck him in the back of the head, driving him to the ground. They then dragged White’s body from the cell. He later died at a hospital. [See: PLN, Mar. ...
