Payout for US detainee who miscarried after police stopped for coffee on way to hospital
Southern California government officials have agreed to pay $480,000 to a woman who went into labor while detained in a local jail and then lost her baby after the guards stopped at a coffee shop while taking her to the hospital.
The payment – designed to settle a federal wrongful death lawsuit pursued by the mother, Sandra Quinones – was approved at a 23 August meeting of the Orange county board of supervisors, according to the minutes of the panel’s session that day.
Quinones, who is no longer in the jail’s custody, must formally accept the settlement for the agreement to be considered final. Her attorney, Dick Herman, did not immediately respond to a message left by the Guardian asking whether Quinones intended to do that.
But he had previously told Orange county’s Register newspaper that the settlement amount that the local governing board had approved “was a very good result for someone badly treated in the jail”.
According to her lawsuit, Quinones was in a jail cell when her water broke on 28 March 2016.
The rupture of the fluid-filled sac surrounding a fetus often signals the beginning of labor.
Quinones pressed a button in her cell meant to call for help, but no staffers at the jail responded for two hours, said the lawsuit from Quinones, whom Herman described as homeless and mentally ill.
When staffers did get to her, they put her in a jail deputy’s patrol car to drive her to Anaheim Global Medical Center rather than in an ambulance. Quinones’ complaint alleged that the deputies taking her to the hospital then made a stop at a Starbucks to buy coffee, costing the expectant mother and her baby precious time amid the health emergency that the mother – who was 28 at the time – was experiencing. Staffers at the hospital to which Quinones was driven admitted, treated and released her, but her fetus ultimately did not survive the stay, the lawsuit recounted. Quinones accused the jail staff of demonstrating “deliberate indifference” toward her civil rights and medical condition, filing a lawsuit in April 2020 demanding compensation for the treatment she said she endured.
County officials – who have said that Quinones was in the middle of serving more than two months in jail after a drug possession arrest – argued that the lawsuit should be dismissed because it had been filed after a statute of limitations passed.
A district court judge ruled in favor of that argument from the county in October 2020. But an appellate court overturned that decision late last year, sending the case back to the district level.
The sheriff’s office operating the jail in question hasn’t publicly commented on the Orange county government’s decision to agree to pay to settle Quinones’s lawsuit.