Family of prisoner who died in county jail settles for $600K

The family of a jail inmate who died in custody will receive a settlement of slightly more than $600,000 after jail staff allegedly failed to provide medical care for the inmate.

“Long story short, he requested medical attention and they didn’t give it to him,” said Bernard P. McDonnell of McDonnell & McDonnell.

The firm represented the father and minor daughter of David Ham, a pretrial detainee in Pemiscot County who was in custody for several days in 2015 due to drug charges.

Ham informed jailers of his need for anti-seizure medication, but it was not provided and he was denied access to care even after he began exhibiting problems, McDonnell said. The lawsuit alleged that jail personnel were not permitted to summon medical personnel without authorization from the administrator, pursuant to the county sheriff’s policy.

The petition said that Ham died at the jail, and that a subsequent autopsy identified the cause of death as the seizure disorder.

Albert Spradling of Spradling and Spradling, which represented the defense, admitted that mistakes had been made and that the request for medication had been lost or misplaced and was not seen in time. But he denied the existence of a policy that prevented medical providers from being alerted.

“The sheriff had made it clear to everyone that if there is an emergency, you call an ambulance,” he said.

He said any defense at trial would likely have centered on causation. He noted that the decedent had not been taking the medication in question for at least the past year.

McDonnell said Ham, who was uninsured, had been self-medicating with prescription drugs he acquired from others to treat his illness.

“That was basically the only alternative,” he said. “He was unemployed intermittently, and he wasn’t in a position to get professional medical care.”

Spradling said the nurse medical officer was not on duty at the time of the incident.

Had the matter gone to trial, McDonnell said he would have argued deliberate indifference and general negligence. He said the latter would have had a lower burden of proof, though it would have been subject to statutory limits that would have restricted any award.

“I think we would have had a reasonable chance, but I think that on deliberate indifference, it might have been a 50/50 proposition,” he said.

He said he believed that, in depositions, the jail staff “came across as people who really meant no harm.”