NaphCare can’t duck contract claims over brutal San Diego jail death

Filed 5d ago · Via Courthouse News · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

Canon in D Major

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

A federal judge has refused to let NaphCare, the healthcare contractor for San Diego County Jail, escape breach-of-contract claims tied to the 2024 killing of 24-year-old Brandon Yates, who was beaten, smothered, and sexually assaulted by cellmate Alvin Ruis after the two men's shared delusions of religious identity turned violent.

U.S. District Judge Thomas Whelan found that Yates' parents and the county plausibly alleged NaphCare's own procedures, if followed, would have flagged Ruis's 'heightened propensity towards violence' and kept the two men apart. NaphCare argued its contract only covered medical care, not protection from other inmates; the judge disagreed, noting the contract covers passive negligence too.

Ruis's murder trial has ended in a deadlocked jury, 11-1. The county, meanwhile, is one of many facing lawsuits over inmate deaths, with a local oversight board estimating 179 deaths in county jail custody since December 2011.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A contractor hired to keep people alive behind bars arguing in court that keeping people alive wasn't really in the job description is the kind of legal creativity that should embarrass everyone involved. The county isn't much better positioned, given it's simultaneously the defendant and the one pointing fingers at its own subcontractor. Somewhere in that finger-pointing, 179 deaths and counting, is a systemic problem nobody in this filing seems eager to actually solve.

Source: Read the original at Courthouse News → Scored: Canon in D Major · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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