CORRECTIONS; DEATH; MEDICAL CARE; MENTAL HEALTH; PRISONS AND PRISONERS;

MENTAL HEALTH;

You asked about the legal claims made in Wiseman v. Armstrong, et al. (No. CV 020821661S (Htfd. Super. (2002)) and the status of the case.

SUMMARY

Elaine Wiseman filed suit against the state and various Department of Correction (DOC) officials, employees, and mental health contractors seeking damages arising from the death on November 17, 1999 of her 28-year old son, Bryant, while incarcerated on the mental health unit at the Garner Correctional Institution. The complaint generally alleges that Mr. Wiseman, who had been diagnosed as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, was denied adequate and proper medical care, supervision and medication, and permitted to become paranoid and aggressive under circumstances that prison employees and medical personnel knew would lead to violent confrontations with other inmates and correctional staff. He was violently subdued and restrained by correctional officers which, it is alleged, led to his death.

Although the lawsuit is still in the early stages, the Connecticut Supreme Court has agreed to rule on the question of whether the psychiatric patient’s bill of rights applies to incarcerated people such as Wiseman. The trial court interpreted that law’s definition of “facility” as including correctional institutions, thus giving Wiseman’s estate the right to sue for damages caused by bill of rights violations.

FACTS

The complaint alleges that on November 17, 1999, Bryant Wiseman died while incarcerated at the Garner Correctional Institution. Prior to his death, Wiseman had been diagnosed as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. The complaint alleges that the DOC’s doctors, nurses, and other medical workers failed to provide adequate and proper medical care, supervision, and medication to him, allowed his mental illness to go untreated and inadequately treated and permitted him to become paranoid and aggressive under circumstances that they knew would lead to violent confrontations with other inmates and correctional staff. It also alleges that on November 17, after several days during which his doctors intentionally withheld required antipsychotic medication, Bryant’s mental illness caused him to become paranoid and disruptive as a result of which he was violently subdued and restrained by more than eight correctional officers and other DOC staff. The plaintiff claims that these actions led to Bryant’s death. It is also claimed that his injuries and death were due to a profound lack of training in how to properly manage and restrain mentally ill inmates.

Finally, the complaint alleges that seven months before Bryant died, another mentally ill prisoner, Timothy Perry, was killed by two lieutenants and a number of guards under similar circumstances while in custody at another DOC facility. The plaintiff claims that Bryant’s death was proximately caused by the failure of those actors to disclose to their superiors the urgent need to train DOC employees how to safely restrain mentally ill inmates.

LEGAL CLAIMS

The lawsuit was brought by the plaintiff as administrator of Wiseman’s estate. Prior to filing the complaint, she obtained permission from the claims commissioner to sue the state for medical malpractice. In addition to the malpractice claim, the complaint contains federal civil rights claims alleging failure to provide adequate medical care, deliberate indifference to safety, failure to protect and train, and use of excessive force.

It also includes three counts based on the psychiatric patient’s bill of rights: failure to provide humane and dignified treatment, failure to provide a specialized treatment plan, and failure to conduct psychiatric examinations. Table 1 shows each claim and the named defendants.

Tale 1: Claims Against Each Defendant

MOTION TO DISMISS

On February 27, 2003, the court granted the defendants’ motion to dismiss the claim against the DOC employees involved in the Timothy Perry incident, finding that the plaintiff lacked standing to bring the claim (Wiseman v. Armstrong, 34 Conn. L. Rptr. 428 (Rittenband, J. )). The court rejected the plaintiff’s legal theory that those involved in the Perry incident caused Wiseman’s death by failing to disclose how Perry died and interfering with DOC officials’ ability to prevent similar injuries in the future. The court ruled that while the defendants had a duty to tell their superiors the truth about the incident, they did not owe this duty to anyone else.

The court denied the defendants’ motion to dismiss the three claims alleging violations of the psychiatric patient’s bill of rights. It concluded that the statutory definition of “facility” (“any inpatient or out-patient hospital, clinic, or other facility for the diagnosis, observation or treatment of persons with psychiatric disabilities”) is broad enough to include DOC facilities. The court found persuasive an excerpt from the Office of Policy and Management 2001-2003 budget which describes Garner as the DOC’s primary psychiatric care facility for offenders requiring long-term, acute, brief, and emergency mental health treatment. And it rejected the state’s argument that the inapplicability of certain bill of rights provisions to prisoners, such as the rights to vote and unrestricted telephone and mail access, demonstrates that the law is not intended to apply to prisoners. Instead, it concluded that constitutional rights and statutes for inmates may be violated for a legitimate penalogical purpose. Therefore, there was nothing illegal in limiting inmates’ privileges to vote and to receive mail and phone calls, but this does not invalidate the other portions of the patient’s bill of rights that apply to inmates who are patients.

STATE’S APPEAL

The state appealed the denial of its motion to dismiss the patients’ bill of rights claims, and on April 24, 2003 the chief justice granted its petition to appeal directly to the Connecticut Supreme Court. As stated in the state’s brief, the four issues the appeal presents are whether the trial court erred:

1. in concluding that correctional institutions are facilities within the patient’s bill of rights act;

2.

in disregarding the well settled doctrine that a statutory scheme must be construed as a whole, creating a harmonious body of law;

3. in disregarding an attorney general opinion (No. 97-016) that concluded that the bill of rights law does not apply to correctional institutions; and

4. in ignoring the analysis of the history of the patient’s bill of rights statutes set forth in an earlier Supreme Court opinion (Mahoney v. Lensink, 213 Conn. 548 (1990)).

Attorneys handling the appeal indicate that the case has not yet been scheduled for oral argument. Several groups, including the Office for Protection and Advocacy for Persons with Disabilities, have asked the Court’s permission to file amicus (friend of the court) briefs supporting the trial court’s interpretation of the statute.

SP-L: ts