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posted by martyb on Thursday September 03 2020, @03:02AM   Printer-friendly

When Asthma in Jail Becomes a Death Sentence:

Growing up, Matt Santana and Savion Hall were inseparable. The two met in middle school while hanging out with mutual friends in Midland, a West Texas oil town. After realizing they lived on the same block, Hall, a year younger than Santana, started sleeping over so they could play video games late into the night. As they got older, Hall and Santana remained dear friends, often turning to each other for help. Santana, who suffers from anxiety, says Hall sometimes spent hours by his side helping calm him down. "He would stay with me until I felt better, whether it was just driving around, listening to music or talking," he says. When Hall had asthma attacks, Santana would make sure he got his breathing treatments, which included inhalers and nebulizers, sometimes taking him to the hospital three or four times a month. The two looked out for each other. "It was special having a friend like that since childhood," Santana says. "I was hoping we would grow old together."

Then Hall was arrested and taken to the Midland County jail last summer. Court records show that he was accused of failing to wear a GPS monitor and testing positive for amphetamines—violations of the probation agreement he'd signed with the local district attorney's office to resolve a drug possession charge earlier that year. Nearly three weeks after Hall entered lockup for the alleged probation violations, jail doctors shipped him to a local hospital due to breathing problems and low oxygen levels, according to a report filed with the Texas Attorney General's office.

Friends say Hall's asthma attacks were frequent and severe enough that they learned to recognize the wheezing and heaving as signs that he needed immediate treatment. But by the time Hall arrived at the hospital from the jail, his condition had deteriorated to the point that medical staff had to resuscitate him. Santana, who saw Hall in the hospital, says his friend showed little brain activity and suffered back-to-back seizures before his family decided to take him off life support eight days later, on July 19, 2019. He was 30 years old. (Hall's family declined to comment for this story.)

Seemingly preventable in-custody deaths like Hall's are common. But while allegations of medical neglect proliferate in lockupsacrossTexas and the rest of the country, rarely do they result in criminal charges. Hall's case is different. Following a Texas Rangers probe, a Midland County grand jury this summer indicted six jail nurses on charges of manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, and knowingly falsifying records for Hall's breathing treatments.

Midland County initially reported that Hall died from "natural causes," the most common cause of death reported by jails in Texas. Nearly 800 in-custody deaths since 2005—slightly more than half of all jail deaths recorded in the state during that time—were attributed to natural causes, according to data compiled by the Texas Justice Initiative. But in recent years, lawsuits, Texas Rangers reports, and newspaper investigations have shown many of those to be preventable tragedies that appear to result from negligence on the part of jail staff. Still, justice for families and accountability for those responsible is elusive.

Local jails in Texas, which mostly hold pretrial detainees who haven't been convicted, have been required to report all deaths in custody to the state since 2009.


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  • (Score: 2) by Aegis on Thursday September 03 2020, @02:29PM (7 children)

    by Aegis (6714) on Thursday September 03 2020, @02:29PM (#1045860)

    Innocent until proven guilty only counts for Republicans at job interviews for the Supreme Court.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday September 03 2020, @03:03PM (6 children)

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Thursday September 03 2020, @03:03PM (#1045877) Journal
    He took a plea deal and was caught violating it. And it wasn't his first offence. He was proven guilty - on the original offence and on violating his plea deal. How is he not guilty?
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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2020, @03:52PM (5 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2020, @03:52PM (#1046363)

      Back to the important part where a non-violent person is jailed ovef posession and then allowed to die without medical aid.

      Fuck you and your ridiculous anger at anything and everything that tweaks your nose.

      • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday September 04 2020, @10:10PM (4 children)

        by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Friday September 04 2020, @10:10PM (#1046573) Journal
        He has to bear responsibility for his own stupidity. You ignore the fact this guy was a repeat loser who didn't give two shits about anything. His death from his own stupidity was inevitable.

        If he had stuck to the plea deal he agreed to, he wouldn't have been in jail in the first place. He knew the consequences - the whole world is aware of how dangerous US jails are. He gambled and lost, and collected his Darwin.

        All the evidence shows an irresponsible punk. So now there will be less petty crime to pay for his lifestyle choices. And he also won't be graduating to more serious crimes. All in all, it's probably the best you can expect. You know it too.

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        • (Score: 3, Touché) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday September 05 2020, @01:28AM (3 children)

          by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Saturday September 05 2020, @01:28AM (#1046637) Journal

          Are...are you feeling all right? This is dangerously close to, if not the exact same as, the "logic" used by the white supremacist crowd when they go "Yeah, well, Floyd was no angel." Let's NOT start sharing tactics with that lot, hm?

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          • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday September 05 2020, @03:57AM (2 children)

            by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Saturday September 05 2020, @03:57AM (#1046670) Journal

            None of this needed to happen. And in the future we'll have to get rid of the half of all cops who will be made redundant by infrastructure advances and AI that will make traffic cops handing out tickets redundant.

            Same as we're going to have to treat illegal drug use as a medical, not criminal, problem. The police chiefs want safe injection sites - it's the politicians who are too chickenshit, afraid they will look soft on crime. Even though safe injection sites save lives and reduce crime.

            Maybe in the 2030s we'll have the common sense to use the money saved by making traffic cops redundant to invest in better social services so that those in danger of falling through the cracks can get the extra attention early enough in life so that outcomes like this are no longer inevitable.

            Or maybe we'll just "invest" it in more corporate welfare. Subsidies to profitable businesses. Extra benefits for the rentiers class and ownership class. Because the poor only have their individual votes, while the rich have lobbyists.

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            • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday September 06 2020, @05:27PM (1 child)

              by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Sunday September 06 2020, @05:27PM (#1047227) Journal

              The US likes to use "fiscal responsibility" as a smoke screen. What they really mean, and the fiscal reality bears this out, is "I want people I don't like to suffer, even if I pay more and we all have shittier quality of life for it." What they really mean is "I don't want people I hate to get anything I think they don't deserve." It's a toxic blend of the Just-World Fallacy and plain old American bigotry, that Long Island Iced Tea of racism, sexism, trans/homophobia, willful ignorance, self-destructive class warfare and toxic cultic "Christianity."

              The upshot of this is, while it would for example save tremendous amounts of money (to say nothing of the moral, social, and humane advantages) to just house the homeless people who do not need extensive extra services as well as housing, no one in power will let that happen. This despite the fact that there are more vacant homes than homeless people. It costs us much more on all levels to make homeless people suffer on the streets, get stuck in jails and ERs and soup kitchens, than to just HOUSE THEM. But that would be "giving someone something they don't deserve," and Americans as a whole are willing to pay more and suffer more themselves to make sure the people they hate suffer even worse.

              Same thing with universal healthcare. Idiots in Appalachia who would be tremendously better off with it will vote against it because "But then them spics'd get free care!" But purely based on poverty levels, a lot of minority people DO get essentially free or low-cost care. The cost of this multitiered system is much higher than universal coverage would be, fewer people are served, and we get resentful class AND race divides because of this. But again: the crab bucket mentality. No one gets ahead, no one moves up, and the most important thing for a bunch of these people is to have someone lower down to shit on.

              This will, if indeed it has not already, destroy the US.

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              • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Monday September 07 2020, @01:32AM

                by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Monday September 07 2020, @01:32AM (#1047369) Journal

                You won't get an argument from me. The average homeless person in the US costs far more just in emergency medical treatment than housing them would cost.

                It's odd that in an economy that depends so much on consumer spending, we don't want to give those at the bottom help to, you know, consume.

                Trickledown is a lie. You want the economy to improve, you don't give tax breaks to the rich - you give money to the poor. The poor poor will put it right back into the local economy, creating jobs. The rich don't do that.

                When the top tax rate was 90% people created jobs, because even 10% of a boatload of money was still a boatload of money. Now, why invest in creating jobs when you can just trade stocks? If the stock market fails, you get your bailout anyway. Same with banks and property speculators.

                So we don't buy a few F35s, and invest the money in people. It's not like the F35 is the right aircraft for fighting, now or in the future.

                And for the proposed supersonic Air Force One, just buy up the almost 2 dozen Concordes. Not a single jet fighter can match its combination of range, speed, and operational ceiling.

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