Class-action suit alleges officials mishandled COVID-19 outbreak at state-run Baltimore jail
GOP officials across US have proposed new limits on access
A federal lawsuit alleges that corrections officials have mishandled an outbreak of the coronavirus at the Chesapeake Detention Facility in Baltimore City, leading to one-third of its inmates and staff members contracting the virus in less than one month.
Filed in U.S. District Court on behalf of a number of inmates at the facility, the class-action lawsuit names Warden Calvin Wilson and Robert Green, Maryland secretary of Public Safety and Correctional Services, as defendants, saying their “actions have fueled this outbreak, and they also have failed to take appropriate action in response.”
According to the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, 169 inmates at the facility as of Feb. 15 have contracted COVID-19, the state-run lockup for men and women awaiting federal trial. In addition, 80 employees have contracted the virus. The lawsuit says the facility has about 400 inmates and 220 employees.
The lawsuit says inmates do not have the means to properly clean their cells, facility officials do not clean common areas in between recreation sessions, and on-site staff do not actively force residents to wear masks or consistently wear them themselves.
“CDF [Chesapeake Detention Facility] has exposed resident after resident to the virus,” the lawsuit reads. “CDF has intermixed different groups of residents — COVID-positive residents, residents who should be quarantined because of potential exposure, newly admitted residents, and COVID-negative residents — and thereby dramatically increased the risk of exposure across the facility.”
Mark Vernarelli, spokesman for the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, declined to comment on the lawsuit’s allegations, writing in an email that officials continue “to follow the guidance of Maryland’s Dept. of Health for mitigating the spread of COVID in its correctional facilities.”
“The Department is constantly testing, utilizing quarantine and isolation housing, and remaining nimble in modifying inmate movement to prevent and mitigate potential spread,” Vernarelli wrote.
Earlier this month, the department said that U.S. marshals and state correctional officers have stopped taking in new prisoners as a result of the spike in new cases.
State and federal courts in Maryland will reopen to the public next month and resume some trials after U.S. Chief District Judge James J. Bredar ordered that some in-person jury trials may resume “on or after March 15,” with “appropriate safety precautions taken in all instances.”
John Fowler, counsel with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which filed the lawsuit with the Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner law firm, said facility officials didn’t properly plan to separate COVID-positive inmates from the rest of the population, creating “this nightmare situation [where] people are getting exposed left and right.”
According to the lawsuit, some inmates have been moved to the Jail Industries Building on East Madison Street, which was closed in 2017. The lawsuit describes the facility as one that has a number of broken or drafty windows, alleging that temperatures inside drop to 55 degrees.
The building has a dormitory-style layout, according to the lawsuit, with beds separated by about 2 feet.
“This facility, which is best described as a broken-down, pest-plagued warehouse, would be an inhumane detention space for healthy inmates,” the lawsuit alleges. “For individuals who have already tested positive for a potentially deadly virus, it is nothing short of horrifying.”
In addition, the lawsuit claims officials have ignored inmates’ requests for medical attention and have not always promptly responded to residents who are exhibiting symptoms related to COVID-19.
Quantae Butler, a 43-year-old inmate at Chesapeake Detention Facility, said he was moved over to the Jail Industries Building after testing positive for COVID-19 about two weeks ago.
Butler, who recently spoke with The Baltimore Sun, said officials have not been separating COVID-positive inmates from the general population, leading to the disease’s spread among inmates and staff.
Suffering from nerve damage after being shot in the chest two years ago, Butler said he has received little medical attention outside of receiving doses of Tylenol and pregabalin, a medication that treats nerve and muscle pain also known by its brand name, Lyrica.
“They don’t know what they’re doing over here,” Butler said. “They treat it like nothing is going on.”
He added that officials rarely do proper cleaning of cells after someone has tested positive for COVID-19. The lawsuit alleges that inmates “who have tested negative for COVID are forced into the cells formerly occupied by residents who have tested positive, without any cleaning of these cells.”
In addition, the lawsuit claims that there have been times when newly admitted inmates have been placed into cells next to others exhibiting COVID-19 symptoms.
“A woman who was a new admission to CDF, for example, was placed in a unit with positive male residents who were symptomatic. Two symptomatic male residents were on each side of her cell,” the lawsuit continues. “When she objected to her being placed in the unit and questioned why it made sense for an apparently negative woman to be placed with positive, symptomatic men, CDF told her ‘not to worry.’ ”
The group is seeking a court order for an independent expert to inspect the facility and force officials to bring it into compliance with CDC guidelines. It asks for inmates to be given hand soap and paper towels and for staffers to clean and disinfect common areas several times a day, among other requests.
The group is also seeking for some inmates with underlying health conditions considered to be vulnerable to the coronavirus to either be released or transferred to another facility, Fowler said.
WASHINGTON — Eight years after carving the heart out of a landmark voting rights law, the Supreme Court is looking at putting new limits on efforts to combat racial discrimination in voting.
The justices are taking up a case about Arizona restrictions on ballot collection and another policy that penalizes voters who cast ballots in the wrong precinct.
The high court’s consideration comes as Republican officials in the state and around the country have proposed more than 150 measures, following last year’s elections, to restrict voting access that civil rights groups say would disproportionately affect Black and Hispanic voters.
A broad Supreme Court ruling would make it harder to fight those efforts in court. Arguments are set for Tuesday via telephone, because of the coronavirus pandemic.
“It would be taking away one of the big tools, in fact, the main tool we have left now, to protect voters against racial discrimination,” said Myrna Perez, director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s voting rights and elections program.
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, said the high court case is about ballot integrity. “This is about protecting the franchise, not disenfranchising anyone,” said Brnovich, who will argue the case Tuesday.
President Joe Biden narrowly won Arizona last year, and since 2018, the state has elected two Democratic senators.
The justices will be reviewing an appeals court ruling against a 2016 Arizona law that limits who can return early ballots for another person and against a separate state policy of discarding ballots if a voter goes to the wrong precinct.
The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the ballot-collection law and the state policy discriminate against minority voters in violation of the federal Voting Rights Act and that the law also violates the Constitution.
The Voting Rights Act, first enacted in 1965, was effective against discrimination at the ballot box because it forced state and local governments, with a history of discrimination, including Arizona, to get advance approval from the Justice Department or a federal court before making any changes to elections.
In 2013, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the portion of the law known as Section 5 could no longer be enforced because the population formula for determining which states were covered hadn’t been updated to take account of racial progress.
Congress “must identify those jurisdictions to be singled out on a basis that makes sense in light of current conditions,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for a conservative majority. “It cannot rely simply on the past.”
Democrats in Congress will try again to revive the advance approval provision of the voting rights law. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act failed in the last Congress, when Republicans controlled the Senate and Donald Trump was in the White House.
But another part of the law, Section 2, applies nationwide and still prohibits discrimination in voting on the basis of race. Civil rights groups and voters alleging racial bias have to go to court and prove their case either by showing intentional discrimination in passing a law or that the
results of the law fall most heavily on minorities.
The new Supreme Court case mainly concerns how plaintiffs can prove discrimination based on the law’s results.
The arguments are taking place against the backdrop of the 2020 election, in which there was a massive increase in early voting and mailed-in ballots because of the pandemic. Trump and his Republican supporters challenged the election results by advancing claims of fraud that were broadly rejected by state and federal courts.
But many Republicans continue to question the election’s outcome, despite the absence of evidence. GOP elected officials have
responded by proposing to restrict early voting and mailed-in ballots, as well as toughen voter identification laws.
The challenged Arizona provisions remained in effect in 2020 because the case was still in the courts.
But Brnovich said last year’s voting is another reason the justices should side with the state. “I think part of the lesson of 2020 was that when people don’t believe that elections have integrity or that their vote is being protected, it will lead to undermining the public’s confidence in the system,” Brnovich said.
Civil rights groups said the court should not use this case to make it harder to root out racial discrimination,
which “still poses a unique threat to our democracy,” as the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund put it in a brief.
The Trump administration backed Arizona. The Biden administration, in a somewhat cryptic letter to the court, said last month that it believes “neither Arizona measure violates Section 2’s results test,” but doesn’t like the way its predecessor analyzed the issues.
The suggestion from the new administration could give the court a narrow way to uphold the Arizona provisions without making any significant changes to voting discrimination law.
A decision is expected by early this summer.
Texas has one of the most restrictive medical marijuana laws in the country, with sales allowed only by prescription for a handful of conditions.
That has not stopped Lukas Gilkey, chief executive of Hometown Hero CBD, based in Austin. His company sells joints, blunts, gummy bears, vaping devices and tinctures that offer a recreational high. Business is also booming online where he sells to many people in other states with strict marijuana laws.
But Gilkey said that he is no outlaw and that he is not selling marijuana, just a close relation. He is offering products with a chemical compound — Delta-8-THC — extracted from hemp. It is only slightly chemically different from Delta 9, which is the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana.
And that small distinction, it turns out, may make a big difference in the eyes of the law. Under federal law, psychoactive Delta 9 is outlawed. But Delta-8-THC is not, a loophole that some entrepreneurs say allows them to sell it in many states where hemp possession is legal. The number of customers “coming into Delta 8 is staggering,” Gilkey said.
“You have a drug that essentially gets you high but is fully legal,” he added. “The whole thing is comical.”
The rise of Delta 8 is a case study in how industrious cannabis entrepreneurs are pulling apart hemp and marijuana to create myriad new product lines with different marketing angles. They are building brands from a variety of potencies, flavors and strains of THC, the intoxicating
substance in cannabis, and of CBD, the nonintoxicating compound that is often sold as a health product.
With Delta 8, entrepreneurs also believe they have found a way to take advantage of the country’s fractured and convoluted laws on recreational marijuana use. It is not quite that simple, though. Federal agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration, are still considering their options for enforcement and regulation.
“Dealing in any way with Delta-8-THC is not without significant legal risk,” said Alex Buscher, a Colorado lawyer who specializes in cannabis law.
Still, experts in the cannabis industry said Delta 8 sales had indeed exploded. Delta 8 is “the fastest-growing segment” of products derived from hemp, said Ian Laird, chief financial officer of New Leaf Data Services, which tracks the hemp and cannabis
markets. He estimated consumer sales of at least $10 million, adding, “Delta 8 has really come out of nowhere over the past year.”
Marijuana and hemp are essentially the same plant, but marijuana has higher concentrations of Delta-9-THC — and, as a source of intoxication, it has been a main focus of entrepreneurs as well as state and federal lawmakers. Delta 8, if discussed at all, was an esoteric, less potent byproduct of both plants.
That changed with the 2018 Farm Bill, an enormous piece of federal legislation that, among other things, legalized widespread hemp farming and distribution. The law also specifically allowed the sale of the plant’s byproducts; the only exception was Delta 9 with a high-enough level of THC to define it as marijuana.
Because the legislation made no mention of Delta 8, entrepreneurs leaped into
the void and began extracting and packaging it as a legal edible and smokable alternative.
Precisely what kind of high Delta 8 produces depends on whom you ask. Some think of it as “marijuana lite,” while others “are pitching it as pain relief with less psychoactivity,” said David Downs, senior content editor for Leafly.com, a popular source of news and information about cannabis.
Either way, Delta 8 has become “extremely ascendant,” Downs said, reflecting what he calls “prohibition downfall interregnum,” where consumer demand and entrepreneurial activity are exploiting the holes in rapidly evolving and fractured law.
“We’re getting reports that you can walk into a truck stop in prohibition states like Georgia where you’re looking at what looks like a cannabis bud in a jar,” Downs said.
The bud is hemp sprayed
with high-concentration Delta 8 oil.
Joe Salome owns the Georgia Hemp Co., which in October started selling Delta 8 locally and shipping nationally — about 25 orders a day, he said.
“It’s taken off tremendously,” Salome said.
His website heralds Delta 8 as “very similar to its psychoactive brother THC,” giving users the same relief from stress and inflammation, “without the same anxiety-producing high that some can experience with THC.”
Salome said that he did not need to buy an expensive state license to sell medical marijuana because he felt protected by the farm bill.
“It’s all right there,” he said, explaining it is now legal to “sell all parts of the plant.”
The legal landscape is contradictory at best. Many states are more permissive than the federal government, which under the Controlled
Substances Act considers marijuana an illegal and highly dangerous drug. In 36 states, marijuana is legal for medicinal use. In 14 states, it is legal for recreational use.
But in a flip, under the farm bill, the federal government opened the door for the sale of hemp products even in states that have not legalized the recreational use of marijuana. Only a few states, like Idaho, ban hemp altogether, but in others, entrepreneurs of Delta 8 are finding a receptive market.
Lawyers for Gilkey believe the farm bill is on their side.
“Delta 8, if it is derived from hemp or extracted from hemp, that is considered hemp,” said Andrea Steel,co-chairofthecannabis business group at Coats Rose, a Houston law firm.
She emphasized that the legality also depends on whether Delta 9 exceeds legal limits.
Steel noted that when making a Delta 8 product, it can be hard, if not impossible, to filter out all the Delta 9 from hemp.
“Adding another wrinkle,” she said, “a lot of labs do not have the capability of delineating between Delta 8 and Delta 9.”
Lisa Pittman, the other co-chair of the cannabis business group at Coats Rose, said that in her reading of the issue, the authors of the farm bill may not have contemplated the consequences of the law.
Pittman said that the ultimate question of a product’s legality may be dependent on other factors, including how the Delta 8 is produced and sourced. Specifically, the lawyers said, the DEA’s rule on the issue seems to suggest that Delta 8 could be illegal if it is made “synthetically” rather than derived organically.
There are currently lawsuits pending over interpretation of the DEA rule.