Los Angeles: America Supreme Court rejected an appeal on Monday California Corrections officers who sought immunity lawsuits Claiming that they acted with deliberate indifference when a fatal incident occurred COVID-19 Four years ago there was an outbreak in one of the world’s most famous prisons.
The judges dismissed the appeal without comment or dissent.
The lawsuit stems from the failed transfer in May 2020 of infected inmates from a Southern California prison to San Quentin, which had no infections at the time. The coronavirus then sickened 75% of the inmates at the prison north of San Francisco, leading to the deaths of 28 inmates and a corrections officer.
California now faces four lawsuits from relatives of those who died, as well as inmates and staff who were infected but survived.
The families’ attorney, Michael J. “The state has followed its due process all the way to the Supreme Court. They are not coming down on a technical issue,” Haddad said in a statement after the high court’s decision. “It’s time to face the facts. Prison administrators murdered 29 people in what the 9th Circuit called a ‘textbook case’ of deliberate indifference.”
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said Monday it does not comment on active legal proceedings.
Prison officials “ignored virtually every security measure” when making the transfer, Marin County Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Howard wrote in a 2021 temporary ruling in the case.
In 2021, California workplace safety regulators fined San Quentin $421,880, one of the largest pandemic-related penalties against an employer.
State Senator Mike McGuire, who represents the San Quentin area, called the deaths “completely avoidable” and said the transfer should never have happened. “I don’t say this lightly, but this is a failure of leadership,” McGuire said during a 2020 Senate oversight hearing.
State lawyers have said prison officials have taken several steps to protect inmates from infection, including temporarily reducing the population of the state’s oldest prison by 40%, as recommended by health experts in June 2020. is less than 50%.
Prison officials said the failed transfer itself was a flawed but well-intentioned effort to move 121 vulnerable inmates away from the outbreak at the California Institution for Men in Chino.
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