Whistleblower suit against prison health system continues

ATLANTA — A Georgia doctor may continue his whistleblower lawsuit against the state’s prison health care system, its director and the warden at the hospital prison where he worked, a federal judge has ruled.

The state officials and agencies had asked U. S. District Judge J. P. Boulee to rule without trial that Dr. Timothy Young didn’t have a case.

He ruled instead that Young’s right to free speech protected his secret disclosures to The Atlanta Journal- Constitution about conditions at Augusta State Medical Prison and that his suit is a valid whistleblower lawsuit, the newspaper reported Thursday.

Young “raised numerous concerns specifically related to inmates’ constitutional rights to healthcare and employees’ state law rights to a safe work environment,” the judge wrote.

No date has been set for trial in the case against warden Ted Philbin, Georgia Correctional HealthCare and its statewide medical director, Dr. Billy Nichols.

Philbin and Nichols had argued that the First Amendment didn’t protect the disclosures. The system’s lawyer had argued that failure to claim violation of any specific law, rule or regulation meant Young wasn’t protected by the Georgia Whistleblower Act.

The law doesn’t require such citations, Boulee wrote in his Sept. 30 ruling.

Young’s lawsuit alleges that management began to ignore and delay basic requests for patient care at Augusta State Medical Prison after the newspaper published a series of stories about dangerous and unsanitary conditions there.

Young, who began working at the medical prison in 2001, said he resigned on Jan. 31, 2018, to avoid being fired. However, the judge ruled that he failed to show any coercion.

The judge also dropped the Georgia Department of Corrections as a defendant in the case, ruling that it wasn’t Young’s employer.

The ruling describes his years of attempts to get the prison staff and state medical system to correct problems.

Those included inadequate heating and cooling, asbestos, mold, and garbage stored in nursing units and the medical clinic, the newspaper reported.

Young talked with an Augusta Chronicle reporter and then began supplying information to the Atlanta Journal- Constitution, the newspaper reported.