DOC to appeal contempt ruling in health case
Attorneys for the Arizona Department of Corrections filed notice over the weekend that they will appeal a finding of contempt of court to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
In June, U.S. District Court Magistrate Judge David Duncan found the department; its director, Charles Ryan; and its medical director, Richard Pratt, in civil contempt of court for repeatedly failing to meet the conditions of a 2014 court settlement with the Amer-
ican Civil Liberties Union over health care in state prisons.
Duncan also imposed sanctions of more than $1.4 million for failed standards from December through February for what he called, “their repeated failed attempts, and too-late efforts, to take their obligation seriously…”
He also asked both sides for suggestions on how to put the sanctions money to best use within the prison health system.
Attorneys for the ACLU and the Prison Law Office, a firm handling much of the litigation, recommended in a filing Monday that 90 percent of the sanctions money be used to hire an expert or experts to investigate instances of inadequate care and the rest to compensate the individual prisoners for the inadequacies.
On Saturday, the Department of Corrections filed its notice of appeal. It must file its initial brief in October, and the plaintiffs, the ACLU and the Arizona Center for Disability Law, must respond by November.
On Friday, the same attorneys for Corrections also filed a motion in U.S. District Court in Phoenix, asking the new judge assigned to the case, Roslyn Silver, to reconsider Duncan’s refusal to terminate a monitoring program, claiming that, despite Duncan’s ruling, they were in compliance with terms of a 2014 settlement.
They said that Duncan had “Throughout the proceedings (…) made remarks that demonstrated that he had prejudged the results.”
Duncan has since retired from bench for health reasons.
The motion also criticized a story by a reporter from the radio station KJZZFM (91.7) that spurred Duncan to call witnesses who were prison health-care providers to see whether the department and its health-care-management company, Corizon Health, were trying to evade monitoring.
A separate motion asked that Silver reverse an order by Duncan to make the prisons abandon an open-clinic format and return to a system in which inmates submit paper requests for medical visits and wait for a scheduled appointment. The class-action suit,
was brought in 2012 by the Arizona Center for Disability Law on behalf of 13 inmates in Department of Corrections prisons, alleging the department provided inadequate care. It was joined by attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union and the California-based Prison Law Office.
Parties in the case reached a settlement in 2014. Duncan continued to monitor compliance with the settlement, but by June 2017, he became increasingly aggravated at the department’s failure to meet the stipulated benchmarks. Whistleblowers testified as to the bad standards of care. Ryan and Pratt testified as well.