Failure to protect from dangerous conditions and medical conditions

Failure to protect from dangerous conditions and medical conditions

While people who are incarcerated lose a certain degree of their rights — including their liberty — they don’t lose all their rights. The Constitution still protects many basic rights. One such right — provided by the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments — is the right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment, even while incarcerated.

What does “failure to protect” mean? 

It’s common knowledge that jails and prisons are often dangerous places. When someone is in jail or prison, they are at the mercy of the guards and rely on them for protection from other inmates. They have little control over their environment and are not allowed to protect or defend themselves the way they would outside of prison.

Not every instance of violence or harm that befalls an inmate leads to a lawsuit. But, generally, the Constitution requires jail personnel to protect those who are incarcerated from unnecessary violence, inhumane conditions of confinement, and medical care for serious medical conditions.

This means that whether an incarcerated person is in a state or federal correctional facility, the Constitution is supposed to protect them from, for example, violence — both at the hands of the institution’s personnel when they use excessive force and at the hands of others incarcerated individuals so long as the institution’s personnel knew of and disregarded an excessive risk to the person’s safety.

Similarly, inadequate medical is not a valid form of punishment; when corrections personnel know of a prisoner’s serious medical condition and disregard a substantial risk of harm that may befall that individual without proper medical care (that is, when the care is nevertheless inadequate), such personnel may be liable under the law.

What are the limitations on “failure to protect” claims?

A key feature of these deliberate indifference claims is that most have a notice requirement. This means that a person who is incarcerated must make staff members at their jail or prison aware of the significant risk of their being harmed if the staff doesn’t act (i.e., put the staff on notice). For claims involving inmate violence, that means the incarcerated person must put the jailers on notice that they need protection from someone threatening to do them harm to implicate the detention officer’s duty to take action. An incarcerated person should take all appropriate action to put jailers on notice through kites, grievances, written notes, or any other written or verbal method so that a paper trail is created and the jailers cannot later say they did not know. For medical issues, this means using medical kites and grievances to detail the medical condition you are suffering from, the symptoms that make it a serious medical condition, and/or anything that shows the condition is worsening, causing you harm, or requiring urgent medical attention.

Further, a federal law called the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) requires that incarcerated people first exhaust their administrative remedies before they may file a claim in federal court. To exhaust administrative remedies, a prisoner needs to attempt to resolve their issues via their prison’s grievance procedures, which typically involves three levels of grievances first.  Each correctional facility is likely to have its own grievance procedures — including deadlines, so an incarcerated person should not assume that the procedure is the same should they transfer facilities.

Also, there is a two-year statute of limitations (deadline to file) for these types of claims. It is very important, therefore, to put institutional personnel on notice about any potential violations of one’s rights (by sending kites and grievances, for example) and to begin the grievance process as soon as possible.

Additionally, if a detainee is being held in a state jail for pending charges (i.e. the person is a pretrial detainee and is not yet serving a sentence), it may be possible to hold those in charge — the governmental entities and their employees—accountable for negligently operating a jail.  This type of claim, however, also has requirements, as a prisoner must give notice of such a legal claim to the Colorado Attorney General’s Office within 182 days of the incident that caused them harm, under the Colorado Governmental Immunity Act (CGIA). Also, the statute of limitations for a claim under the CGIA is only one year.

Attorneys at the Civil Rights Litigation Group understand that sometimes things that aren’t “supposed” to happen — things that the Constitution is meant to protect against — nevertheless occur. We take such violations of prisoners’ rights seriously, and we fight to pursue claims against abusive detention staff to the fullest degree, taking all appropriate measures to hold the responsible party(s) accountable for their action or inaction.

If you or a loved one has been physically injured by the excessive force of a detention officer, physically injured despite pleas for protection from impending violence at the hands of others, or were ignored and experienced serious medical harm when detention officers were given notice of a serious medical need that posed a significant risk of harm, you may have a claim for a civil rights violation.

Denver civil rights lawyers for Eighth Amendment violations

The Eighth Amendment protects from many types of cruel and unusual punishment, including:

• Physical abuse or the use of excessive force by detention officers
• Sexual abuse by detention officers
• Indifference to known safety issues, dangers, and or/violence
• Deliberate indifference to the medical needs of detainees.

How the Civil Rights Litigation Group can help

It takes an experienced and knowledgeable lawyer to fight these kinds of cases. Attorneys at the Civil Rights Litigation Group are both knowledgeable and adamant about protecting the rights of people who are incarcerated. Not only do we believe that every incarcerated person deserves access to certain standards of living and protection from physical harm, but we also firmly believe that piling further punishment in the form of violence, danger, and denied medical care on top of the existing punishment of being incarcerated is fundamentally wrong and abusive in addition to being against the law.

Cases about violations of prisoners’ rights may seem straightforward, but they are rarely simple and you’ll need a team of aggressive, confident, and highly professional civil rights attorneys to hold detention officers, wardens, and other detention staff accountable for their actions. With the Civil Rights Litigation Group at your side, you can fight back against such injustice.

Contact our Denver law office today for a free consultation.

If you or someone you know is or was being abused while incarcerated, or experienced other rights violations like those described above, it is essential to contact the Civil Rights Litigation Group as soon as possible. These cases can be extremely complicated, and extensive investigation into the abuse may be necessary. Nonetheless, once we take on your case, we’ll devote substantial resources to collecting evidence and building a strong case.

Although we can make no guarantees regarding the outcome of the case, we can assure continual communication with you so that you’re involved/aware during every step. We can also assure a no-stones-unturned legal approach.

For a free consultation with our Denver, Colorado law firm, call us today at (720) 515-6165.