Ruth Denham v. Corizon Health, Inc.

675 F. App'x 935
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit
DecidedJanuary 13, 2017
Docket15-12974
StatusUnpublished
Cited by28 cases

This text of 675 F. App'x 935 (Ruth Denham v. Corizon Health, Inc.) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Ruth Denham v. Corizon Health, Inc., 675 F. App'x 935 (11th Cir. 2017).

Opinions

PER CURIAM:

This appeal requires us to decide whether a county and the healthcare provider at its jail are liable for the death of pretrial detainee Tracy Lee Veira, 42 U.S.C. § 1983, where the record does not establish a pattern of similar incidents at the jail, knowledge by county policymakers of [937]*937the practice that the plaintiff alleges violated the detainee’s constitutional rights, or a causal link between any custom of the healthcare provider and the detainee’s death. Three days after Veira turned herself in at the Volusia County jail, the medical staff at the jail, furnished by Corizon Health, Inc., diagnosed her as suffering from opiate withdrawal. The medical staff devised a treatment plan for Veira that required officers, not medical personnel, to observe her every fifteen minutes. Officers found her dead in her cell three-and-a-half days later. The personal representative of Veira’s estate, Ruth Denham, sued Volusia County and Corizon for violating Veira’s rights under the Fourteenth Amendment by acting with deliberate indifference to Veira’s serious medical needs, id. § 1983. Volusia County and Corizon moved for summary judgment on the ground that Denham failed to establish facts that proved that either entity had a custom or policy of deliberate indifference to Veira’s serious medical needs. The district court granted the motions. After reviewing the record and the parties’ briefs, and hearing oral argument, we agree that Volusia County and Corizon are entitled to summary judgment. Because Denham has failed to establish a genuine issue of material fact regarding whether either entity had a custom or policy of deliberate indifference that caused Veira’s death, we affirm the decision of the district court.

I. BACKGROUND

The facts of this case are undeniably tragic. On September 9, 2009, Veira turned herself in at the Volusia County Jail, after she violated her probation for convictions of driving with a canceled, suspended, or revoked license and fleeing law enforcement officers. Corizon was the contract healthcare provider at the jail. Before her imprisonment, Veira was prescribed Oxy-codone and Xanax by her physician to treat symptoms of chronic back pain. These prescribed medications were discontinued after Veira’s booking because Oxy-codone and Xanax may not be distributed to inmates.

Three days after she entered the jail, Veira went to the medical clinic and expressed that she had been vomiting in her cell. A nurse identified signs of opiate withdrawal and called the nurse practitioner. Without examining Veira, a doctor gave “Physician’s Orders” over the phone that prescribed various medications and instructed that Veira be placed on a clear liquid diet for three days. The medical staff also began a medical protocol to monitor Veira’s withdrawal symptoms and moved Veira from the general prison population to medical segregation, where she was placed on medical watch. Jail policy required that corrections officers observe an inmate on medical watch “in time intervals not to exceed every 15 minutes and document[] as such” on a watch sheet.

In the “early afternoon” on September 14, two days after Veira was placed on the medical protocol, she called her friend Crystal Wharton. She told Wharton that she felt sicker than ever before and had submitted multiple requests for mental health services but that no nurse had come to see her. Veira asked Wharton to call the medical clinic for her, which Wharton did. The medical staff saw Veira at 3:45 p.m. that day.

Veira went to the nurses’ station again the next day, September 15, at around 2:30 p.m. According to one nurse, Nurse Jones, Veira “was slumped over lying across 3 chairs, lethargic, diaphoretic, with pale skin, arms and legs twitching, [and] exhibiting slurred speech.” Jones was concerned. She informed the head nurse that Veira needed immediate medical attention and looked like she needed to go to the [938]*938hospital. But thirty minutes later, when Jones returned to the nurses’ station, Veira was in the same condition. The head nurse told Jones that she had not seen Veira “and that the other [nurse] could see [Veira] when she was done with what she was doing.” When the other nurse examined Veira, she discovered that Veira had lost so much weight since she entered the jail that the blood pressure cuff would not fit. The other nurse later told Jones that the head nurse had 'said Veira was “just DT’ing, [was] already on MLD and medication,” and just needed water.1 A member of the medical staff wrote in Veira’s medical record that, at this time, Veira was suffering from mild withdrawal.

That night, Veira “moaned and cried out loudly in pain ,,., asking for help,” but the guards ignored her pleas and “talk[ed] among themselves in a negative fashion about ‘people cornin’ in here on drugs.” The watch sheet for that evening and the following morning did not “show[] any hint of [a] problem.” But at 9:45 a.m., an officer found Veira unconscious in her cell. Veira was “in full rigor mortis and with moderate liver mortis.” Her body was covered in “a dark green bilious vomit,” and a “cup next to her head was filled to the brim with the same fluid.” According to the watch sheet for that time period, Veira had been observed every fifteen minutes. The majority of the notations stated that Veira was observed lying on her bunk breathing, and none of them marked anything out of the ordinary.

Two officers admitted that they made incorrect entries on the watch sheet in the hour or two before Veira’s death. One of the officers stated that she wrote “on bunk breathing” on the watch sheet incorrectly for the 8:45 a.m, and 9:00 a.m. entries. The officer said that she actually saw Veira sitting on the toilet at 8:45 a.m. and standing at her cell door at 9:00 a.m. The other officer, a sergeant, wrote on the watch sheet that she spoke with Veira at 8:33 a.m., but later stated that she did not speak with her and instead saw her on her bed, apparently sleeping. One of Denham’s medical experts disputed these statements. He stated that “purported observations of ... Veira by [ ] staff that she was standing at her door less than an hour before she was found unresponsive, or sitting on the toilet just over an hour before she was found, are preposterous?” because, based on the condition of the body when it was found, Veira had likely been dead for at least one to two hours before she was found at 9:54 a.m.

Additionally, the officers often recorded watches that never occurred, and the supervisors would help the officers falsify the sheets. According to Dr. Marilyn Ford, the Corrections Director for the Volusia County Division of Corrections, employee records from 2005 through the date of Veira's death in 2009 reveal that, excluding the reprimands associated with Veira’s death, there were “eight other instances where corrections officers either failed to properly maintain watch over inmates or failed to properly document their activities.” Dr. Ford explained that “[i]n every case, employees were disciplined.”

At the autopsy, the medical examiner discovered that Veira had lost at least 19 pounds over the six-and-a-half days she was imprisoned. He listed “withdrawal from opiate abuse” as a significant condition of Veira’s cause of death. Dr. Kris Sperry, one of Denham’s medical experts, stated that, in his opinion, “Veira died of the complications of severe vomiting and dehydration which caused her to vomit, aspirate that vomit, develop aspiration pneumonia, and die.” Dr.

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675 F. App'x 935, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/ruth-denham-v-corizon-health-inc-ca11-2017.