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May 28, 2022
stltoday.com
Federal jury in St. Louis awards
$8.5 million in jail health care case
Advanced Correctional Healthcare is the largest privately
owned provider of health care services to county jails in the country. It has
contracts with more than 320 jails in 18 states, mostly in the Midwest,
including several in Missouri and Illinois. On its website, it used to brag
that it had never had a lawsuit "result in a judgment" against the
company or its doctors. That's no longer true. On May 24 a federal jury in St.
Louis awarded the sister of Bilal Hill $8.5 million in damages relating to
Hill's death. The Columbia, Missouri, man died of lung cancer at the age of 43
after a several-months-long stay in the Phelps County Jail. He complained of
pain and a growth in his neck from early in his stay there. His pleas were
ignored by the company and its doctors contracted to provide health care to
inmates at the jail, jurors found. "The jury saw the same things that we
saw," said Hill's sister, Lady Maakia Charlene
Smith. She lives in North Carolina and was on the phone with the jail regularly
advocating for her brother. He was being held while awaiting trial on federal
charges for alleged possession of marijuana, K-2, and guns. "People are
treated differently if they get outside care versus care inside the
facility," Smith said. "They basically let him deteriorate and waste
away for more than three months. He was in excruciating pain. The nurse and the
doctor were very dismissive of his complaints. It was inhumane. I've seen
animals treated better than my brother did in jail." After Hill went
nearly 80 days without medical care, Smith was eventually successful in
convincing jail officials to send her brother to the Phelps County Hospital for
care. Physicians there immediately saw a man with serious medical needs and
transferred him to CoxHealth Medical Center in
Springfield. There, he received a terminal cancer diagnosis. He was released
from federal custody and sent home to die, with his sister and his son. The
case, filed in 2020, should open the eyes of counties that contract with
private health care companies, say the family's attorneys, Brandon Gutshall, Charlie Eblen and
Lindsey Heinz of the Shook, Hardy, and Bacon law firm. "You see a lot of
bad actors," in this industry, Eblen says.
"We think they have a business model that really seeks to minimize inmate
care. They really try to do as little as they can get away with." Like so
many things related to jails and prisons in the U.S., privatized health care is
a multibillion-dollar industry, with several big players, such as Wellpath and Corizon. The companies started springing up in
the 1970s after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that "deliberate
indifference" to a detainee's care was a violation of the Eighth Amendment
protections against "cruel and unusual punishment." But as the
privatized health care industry grew, so did jail deaths, Reuters found in a
2020 report on the poor treatment of jail detainees. Search any state's court
records and there are dozens of wrongful death and other similar lawsuits
against privatized jail health care companies. At least 10 have been filed in
Missouri state courts against Advanced Correctional Healthcare, and another
dozen or so in federal court. One case out of Buchanan County, filed in 2017 against
both Advanced Correctional Healthcare and Corizon, is headed to trial later
this summer. The company faces a class action lawsuit over alleged poor jail
care in St. Francois County. The size of the verdict in Hill's case was a shock
to the company, said its St. Louis attorney, Tad Eckenrode.
The company is considering an appeal. The case was surely tragic, Eckenrode said, but "there was no testimony at trial
that the purported delay in care impacted his cancer treatment or
life-expectancy." That's not how Hill's sister, or her attorneys, saw the
case unfold. "The facts in this case are egregious," Gutshall says. Hill was in pain from almost the moment he
entered the jail. "He was crying and begging for help. Toward the end, his
pain was so bad he couldn't even get out of bed. He was just ignored." It
is the sort of comment that comes up frequently when people die in jail, and
that's why Smith says it's important for family members to do their best to be
advocates for their loved ones when they end up behind bars. "If you don't
have families that will advocate for you, they'll feel like they can sweep it
under the rug," Smith says. "People need to check on their family. I
know people get frustrated and upset when people are incarcerated. If my
brother had laid down and died in that jail, we would have known nothing."