Iowa care home accused of human experiments
DES MOINES, Iowa – The U.S. Justice Department has found a state-run care center for people with intellectual disabilities has likely violated the constitutional rights of residents by subjecting them to human experiments, some of which were deemed dangerous by federal investigators.
A report released Tuesday identified broad failures at the Glenwood Resource Center, including poor treatment of residents and failure of the Iowa Department
of Human Services to respond. The report said breakdowns in the quality of physical health care exposed residents to harm and serious risk of harm.
“Iowa has been deliberately indifferent to those breakdowns and the risks they pose. Glenwood frequently leaves residents at serious risk of harm or death by ignoring changes in condition outright, or by adopting a clinically unjustified ‘wait and see’ approach,” the report said.
The department began investigating in November 2019, just months after The Des Moines Register reported an unusually high number of deaths at Glenwood and quoted workers blaming inadequate care as the cause of some deaths.
The DOJ investigation concluded that there is reasonable cause to believe the conditions at Glenwood violate the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
“Individuals with disabilities are not human guinea pigs, and like all persons, they should never be subject to bizarre and deviant pseudo-medical ‘experiments’ that injure them,” said Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband for the Civil Rights Division. “Human experimentation is the hallmark of sick totalitarian states and has no place in the United States of America. The U.S. Constitution protects the right of all persons in this free country who are in the care of the state to be reasonably free from harm or the risk of harm.”
He said the department will work with Iowa to ensure reforms are instituted at Glenwood.