LOS ANGELES – The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday denied an appeal by California prison officials seeking immunity from lawsuits, alleging they acted with deliberate indifference when they caused a deadly COVID-19 outbreak in one of the world’s most notorious prisons four years ago. years.
The judges rejected the appeal without comment or dissent.
The lawsuit stemmed from the botched transfer of infected inmates in May 2020 from a Southern California prison to San Quentin, which at the time had no infections. The coronavirus quickly sickened 75% of inmates at the prison north of San Francisco, leading to the deaths of 28 inmates and a corrections officer.
California now faces four lawsuits filed by relatives of those who died, as well as inmates and staff who were infected but survived.
“The state had due process all the way to the Supreme Court. They are not getting away with a technicality,” Michael J. Haddad, an attorney for the families, said in a statement after the high court ruling. “Now it’s time to face the facts. Prison administrators killed 29 people in what the 9th Circuit called a ‘classic case’ of deliberate indifference.”
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said Monday it does not comment on active litigation.
Corrections officials “ignored virtually all security measures” when making the transfers, Marin County Superior Court Judge Geoffrey Howard wrote in a 2021 tentative ruling in the case.
In 2021, California workplace safety regulators hit San Quentin with a $421,880 fine, one of the largest pandemic-related penalties against an employer.
State Sen. Mike McGuire, who represents the San Quentin area, called the deaths “completely preventable” and said the transfer should never have happened. “I don’t say this lightly, but it’s a failure of leadership,” McGuire said during a 2020 Senate oversight hearing.
Lawyers for the state have maintained that prison officials have taken several steps to try to protect inmates from infection, including temporarily reducing the population of the state’s oldest prison by 40%, below the 50% recommended in June 2020 by health experts.
Prison officials said the botched transfer itself was a flawed but well-intentioned effort to divert 121 vulnerable inmates from an outbreak at the California Institution for Men in Chino.
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