San Quentin prisoner’s widow wins key ruling in COVID lawsuit

A federal appeals court has ruled that a lawsuit filed by the widow of a San Quentin inmate who died of COVID-19 can move forward.

The ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco on Tuesday reversed a lower court’s decision that would have prevented the suit from proceeding.

Jacqueline Hampton has sued the state, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), San Quentin State Prison and some prison officials for the death of her husband, Michael Hampton.

In August, the 9th Circuit issued a similar ruling in an appeal arising out of virtually identical allegations. That suit was brought by the family of a San Quentin prison guard, Gilbert Polanco, who also died during the coronavirus outbreak.

“Whether we’re talking about prison guards or inmates, we’re talking about human beings who were affected in the same way,” said Michael Haddad, the attorney representing both families. “The courts are now saying that when you create such a deadly environment in the prison, it affects everybody.”

Todd Javernick, a CDCR spokesman, said the department “does not comment on litigation.”

Michael Hampton, who was serving a three-strikes sentence for a burglary conviction related to drugs, died at the prison on Sept. 25, 2020, after contracting COVID-19. Hampton had several health conditions that placed him at high risk should he become infected with COVID-19, including obesity, hypertension and pre-diabetes.

Hampton began experiencing symptoms in early June, soon after 122 inmates from the California Institution for Men, which had a severe COVID-19 outbreak, were moved to San Quentin. Hampton was placed on a ventilator in early August.

The outbreak sparked by the transfer resulted in the death of 28 inmates and Polanco. More than 2,100 inmates and 270 staff members were infected.

In her suit, Hampton’s widow asserts that the prison’s failure to protect her husband from the outbreak violated his statutory rights and his rights under the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments.”

Prison officials claimed immunity under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP). The law limits legal liability for the administration of medical countermeasures during times of crisis.

Congress passed the PREP Act in 2005 to encourage the development and deployment of medical countermeasures — such as diagnostics, treatments and vaccines — by limiting legal liability.

But Judge Michelle Friedland wrote in her decision that the question of whether defendants are immune under the PREP Act depends on whether the plaintiff’s claims are for a loss caused by a medical countermeasure.

In this instance, Friedland said, most of the men who were transferred had not been tested for COVID-19 for more than three weeks, and none was properly screened for symptoms before being packed onto buses to San Quentin in numbers far exceeding coronavirus-era capacity limits that the CDCR had mandated for inmate safety.

Friedland wrote that although some inmates exhibited symptoms while on the bus, the prisons department did not quarantine the newly arriving inmates. Instead, most of the transferred inmates were moved into a housing unit with grated doors and allowed to use the same showers and eat in the same mess hall as other inmates.

Friedland also wrote that two days after the transfer, Marin County Public Health Officer Matt Willis contacted the prison and recommended that the transferred inmates be sequestered; that all exposed inmates and staff be required to wear masks; and that staff movement be restricted between different housing units to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Prison officials told Willis he lacked the authority to mandate measures in a state prison.

In denying the prison officials’ claim of immunity, Friedland wrote, “The PREP Act provides immunity only from claims that relate to ‘the administration to or the use by an individual of’ a covered countermeasure — not such a measure’s non-administration or non-use.”

Defendants in the suit also argued for limited immunity on the basis that they faced an impossible choice: keep high-risk California Institution for Men inmates at a prison experiencing an active COVID-19 outbreak, or transfer the inmates out of that prison. They asserted that either way they would have placed some set of inmates in danger and risked liability for doing so.

But Friedland said that argument fails because it isn’t the decision to transfer the inmates that is being challenged, but the “decisions that defendants made in carrying out the transfer that increased the risk to San Quentin inmates without decreasing the risk to the transferred inmates.”

Haddad said the decision “merely means that we can go ahead and actually bring the case.”

“We haven’t even been able to start discovery yet, so just imagine all the emails, text messages, policies and other records that we need to look at now,” he said.

Haddad said the decision also clears the way for other suits. Haddad said he is representing two other clients who are bringing wrongful death cases against the state related to the same circumstances, and he knows of two others.

He said there is also a class action suit in the works and a number of inmates have filed actions on their own without the aid of a lawyer.