Judge rejects cutting inmate crowding
SACRAMENTO >> A Northern California judge tentatively ruled Friday that state prison officials acted with deliberate indifference when they caused a deadly coronavirus outbreak at one of the world’s most famous prisons last year. But he said vaccines have since so changed the landscape that officials are no longer violating inmates’ constitutional rights.
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 then quickly sickened 75% of inmates at the prison north of San Francisco, leading to the deaths of 28 inmates and a correctional officer.
Prison officials “ignored virtually every safety measure in doing so,” Marin County Superior Court Judge Geoffrey Howard wrote in a 114-page tentative ruling Friday.
“The tragic, inevitable, result of this bumbling sequence of events was an exponential COVID-19 outbreak at San Quentin that, to date, has killed 28 people,” he wrote. “It more than qualifies as deliberate indifference to a known risk.”
But he preliminarily rejected inmates’ request that he essentially reinstate an appeals court ruling from October 2020 requiring corrections officials to cut the inmate population to less than half of San Quentin’s designed capacity.
The California Supreme Court put that appeals court order on hold in December pending the trial that took place in Howard’s courtroom this summer.
The appeals court order came during the height
of the pandemic in October 2020, after the deadly summer surge at San Quentin and before a statewide winter spike that strained hospitals and intensive care units.
Howard tentatively concluded that conditions have substantially changed since then, mainly because he said prison officials have
done their best to vaccinate every inmate who agrees to be inoculated.
Those vaccinations “substantially reduce the danger posed by COVID-19 within the prison. That risk, though undoubtedly substantial and serious, may well not exceed contemporary standards of decency,” he wrote.