WP: Amends Made in Wrongful Jailing

[MountainLaurel]

Two years, and no one realized this man couldn't hear them? And the Bushistas want even more private contractors in charge of prisons?

:mad:

Joseph Heard, the deaf, mute and mentally disabled man who was mistakenly held in the D.C. jail for nearly two years, will receive between $1.2 million and $1.5 million from the District and a private contractor to settle a three-year-old lawsuit under an agreement approved yesterday by a federal judge.

The District also agreed to pay reasonable attorney fees for the law firm Heard used, although that amount remains in dispute. The private contractor, which provided medical services at the jail and was responsible for monitoring Heard, agreed to pay $640,000.

snip

Heard was arrested in November 1998 on a misdemeanor charge of unlawful entry and ordered committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital several months later. After doctors found him mentally incompetent to stand trial, a D.C. Superior Court judge in October 1999 dismissed the charge and ordered him set free.

But he was taken to the jail instead because computer records erroneously showed that he had an outstanding charge in another case. Although a records officer at the jail later learned that this charge, too, had been dismissed, the paperwork authorizing Heard's release never arrived.

Heard, who had received a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, stayed at the jail until Aug. 13, 2001, after jail officials reviewing the files of inmates in the mental health unit wondered why they could not locate his records.

During those 22 months, he received no visits from family members, friends or attorneys. He often scrawled the word "innocent" on scraps of paper and tried to communicate through another inmate that his jailing was a big mistake, but guards and mental health staff ignored his pleas, according to Heard and several witnesses who gave depositions in his lawsuit.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/04/AR2005080401340.html

[Kagemusha]

1. The better question is if they cared he couldn't hear them.

As they say, "Everyone says he's innocent!" Who'd actually believe someone really is. Unless the paperwork says so, not their problem.

We cannot expect the exception to make the rule for the individual guard. We can expect punishments to prod those who shuffle paperwork that affects an individual's freedom to provide encouragement to get it right.

[Sgent]

2. Bigger question

If he's been declared mentally incompetant to stand trial, should he be in a jail or hospital (or niether)?

The fact they took him to jail after the hospital raises big questions on the protection of the mentall ill, and although this is routine, it shouldn't be.

[Southpaw Bookworm]

3. Update with more details

In today's WP:

Throughout the 669 days that Joseph Heard spent in the D.C. jail, nearly a dozen employees working there had warnings that he was wrongly imprisoned and had opportunities to fix the mistake.

snip

Heard should have been freed on his second day behind bars, an internal D.C. Department of Corrections investigation shows, when a jail records clerk confirmed with the court that he should not be in the jail because no charges were pending against him. She noted that in his file, but no one followed up to make sure he was freed.

Heard's caseworker, the jail employee designated as his chief advocate, could provide no record of meeting with him during the months Heard was assigned to her, although the department requires caseworkers to document each meeting. She later explained that she could not represent his interests well or learn his legal status because she could not find his file, according to the investigation.

A fellow inmate with limited sign language skills said in a deposition that he alerted Heard's social worker to Heard's claim that he was in jail by mistake but was told to mind his own business.

All that came at a time when the Department of Corrections had been warned repeatedly that its flawed records system was bound to result in people being jailed or released in error, but the department had done little to address the problem. A series of internal investigations and reports called the records office dysfunctional and the computer system riddled with errors.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/06/AR2005080601516.html