SALT LAKE CITY – A Utah Prison inmate is suing the Utah Department of Corrections in an effort to stem the tide of large groups of inmates from one building to the next.
Damon Crist says the practice has fueled widespread COVID-19 outbreaks in the prison since October. The spread continued in the following months, infecting more than 2,600 prisoners, including 12 who later died.
“I’m not asking for money. I’m not asking to be released,” Crist told the Deseret News during a phone call from the prison on Draper. “I’m just saying, ‘Look, the department is moving people recklessly. It causes mass outbreaks and it infects and kills people. ‘
Crist joins other inmates and claims that his requests to visit a doctor or nurse have remained unanswered. And his lawsuit comes amid calls to investigate how the prison handled outbreaks.
“I think there needs to be a lot more transparency about the circumstances under which the deaths took place in detention, a lot more transparency around the medical care offered to people in detention, and there really needs to be a legislative audit,” Sara Wolovick said. an ACLU lawyer, focused on prisoners’ rights.
Crist says the handling of the virus by the prison amounts to cruel and unusual punishment for inmates and violates a ban in the Utah Constitution against “excessive rigor” for inmates. The prison is also at odds with its own behavior of employees that endangers the safety of staff and inmates, he said.
In one example, employees instructed a sick prisoner with shortness of breath and eclipse to “take a deep breath,” Crist said in his lawsuit.
He alleges intentional indifference on the part of the state, a legal standard considered the threshold for successful legal claims against prisons and jails. They are generally only held liable if it is clear that they know medical care is inadequate, Wolovick said. This creates an incentive for those in authority to avoid having the care investigated.
“The legal landscape for medical care for prisoners rewards ignorance on a practical level,” Wolovick said. But an outside review could provide details, she noted.
A Utah Department of Corrections spokesman declined to comment, citing pending legal action.
The agency said it takes many factors into account when moving those in its care to new areas and working with state and state health officials to decide how the inmates who test positive, from those who test negative for COVID-19 is tested, distinguished.
Crist says an initial move of Oct. 23 brought COVID-19 to the Lone Peak facility, where he lived at the time, in a handwritten petition for extraordinary relief, which was filed in Salt Lake City District Court last month. During the move, negative and positive inmates spent hours in the same dormitories, he said.
“None of the prisoners transferred were tested on COVID-19 or even questioned if they had symptoms,” he said.
It was a matter of days before he became ill with cough and fever. Crist said he tested positive the first week in November, but still struggled to breathe and missed brain.
Some around him struggled to get out of bed, he said, while others had no symptoms.
A total of 1,065 inmates and 63 staff members are considered active cases of COVID-19, according to the department’s data from Tuesday, the most recent available.
He claims the Utah Department of Corrections does not have the means to deal with massive outbreaks, and some nurses have administered several COVID-19 tests without changing gloves.
Judge Keith Kelly last week ordered the department to respond to the allegations within 30 days. The agency has not done so yet.
Crist, a lawyer, said he was eager to complete his conviction for theft so he could get back to working on managing construction projects. He wants to at least stop the moves until prisoners get vaccinated against coronavirus. State health officials said they expected the prisoners to be vaccinated in March.
Crist also wants the judge to correct employees to wear N95 masks, change gloves after each test and institute a two-week quarantine protocol for any move required due to a doctor’s order or a significant threat.
Others have challenged coronavirus protocols for captured Utahns, but previous legal attempts have been unsuccessful.
The ACLU and attorneys sued in April in an attempt to enforce greater release of awaiting trial, older inmates and medically defenseless, but the Utah High Court dismissed the lawsuit on procedural grounds.
The judges ruled that the groups did not have the right to pursue the case, in part because they were not directly affected by the prison policy.
A federal judge in the U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City has also filed a lawsuit against federal inmates at Weber County Jail, but has not barred them from reviving the case in the future.
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Annie Knox