SALT LAKE CITY – A Utah State Prison inmate is suing the Utah Department of Corrections in an effort to stop large groups of inmates from moving from building to building.
Damon Crist says the practice has caused widespread outbreaks of COVID-19 in prison since October. The spread continued in the following months, infecting more than 2,600 detainees, including 12 who later died.
“I’m not asking for money. I’m not asking to be released,” Crist told Deseret News during a phone call on the prison’s Draper website. “I’m just saying, ‘Look, the department is moving people recklessly. It causes mass outbreaks and infects and kills people. “
Crist joins the other detainees in claiming that his requests to see a doctor or nurse went unanswered. And his trial comes amid requests to investigate how the prison handled the outbreaks.
“I think there needs to be a lot more transparency about the circumstances of the deaths in custody, a lot more transparency about the medical care provided to people in custody, and there really needs to be a legislative audit,” he said. said Sara Wolovick, an ACLU lawyer focused on detainees’ rights.
Christ says prison management of the virus amounts to cruel and unusual punishments for inmates and violates the Utah Constitution’s ban on “excessive rigor” for inmates. He said the prison runs counter to its own employee conduct policy, which compromises the safety of staff and detainees.
In one example, employees instructed a sick inmate who was out of breath and dying to “take a deep breath,” Christ said in his trial.
He accuses deliberate indifference on the part of the state, a legal standard considered the threshold for successful legal demands against prisons and jails. In general, they are held accountable only if it is clear that they knew the care was inadequate, Wolovick said, creating an incentive for those in authority to avoid examining care.
“The legal landscape of health care for inmates rewards ignorance on a practical level,” Wolovick said. But an external analysis could provide details, she noted.
A spokeswoman for the Utah Department of Corrections declined to comment, citing ongoing legal action.
The agency said it considers many factors when moving caregivers to new areas and works with state and county health officials to decide how best to separate positive test inmates from those who test. negative results for COVID-19.
Crist says an initial move on Oct. 23 brought several of them with COVID-19 to the Lone Peak facility, where he lived at the time, he accuses in a handwritten petition for extraordinary relief filed last month in District Court 3 from Salt Lake City. During the movements, the negative and positive detainees stayed in the same dormitories for hours, he said.
“None of the transferred detainees were tested for COVID-19 or even asked if they had any symptoms,” he said at trial.
It took a few days for him to get a cough and a fever. Crist said he gave positive results in the first week of November, but continues to have trouble breathing and has a brain fog.
Some around him struggled to get out of bed, he said, while others had no symptoms.
A total of 1,065 detainees and 63 staff members are considered to have active cases of COVID-19, according to the department’s latest data available on Tuesday.
He claims that the Utah Department of Corrections does not have the resources to deal with the massive outbreaks, with some nurses administering several COVID-19 tests without changing gloves.
Judge Keith Kelly ordered the department last week to respond to the charges within 30 days. The agency has not yet done so.
Crist, a paralegal, said he was eager to complete his sentence for theft convictions so he could return to work managing construction projects. He seeks to stop the movements at least until the detainees receive a vaccine against coronavirus. Health officials said state inmates are expected to be inoculated in March.
Crist also wants the judge to order correctional officers to wear N95 masks, change gloves after each test, and establish a two-week quarantine protocol for any necessary movement due to a doctor’s order or a significant threat.
Others have challenged coronavirus protocols for incarcerated Utahns, but previous legal efforts have failed.
The ACLU and defense attorneys sued in April in an effort to force the greater release of those awaiting trial, older detainees and the medically vulnerable, but the Utah Supreme Court rejected the offer based on procedural reasons.
The judges found that the groups did not have the status to bring the case, in part because they were not directly affected by prison policies.
A federal judge in the U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City similarly dismissed a lawsuit from federal detainees in Weber County Jail, but did not stop them from reviving the case in the future.
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Annie Knox