FATAL INDIFFERENCE

Inattention or indifference doesn't do me any harm. The same wasn't true, unfortunately, for Deborah Braillard, a 46-year-old woman who was arrested and jailed on New Year's Day. According to a notice of claim filed by her family's attorney against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, as well as Howard Salmon, director of Maricopa County Correctional Health Services, and several others, Braillard was an insulin-dependent diabetic whose condition was ignored or treated with indifference by authorities, plunging her after three days into a diabetic shock that led to her death. "It's beyond outrageous what happened here," said attorney Michael Manning, whose $20 million claim is the first step toward a lawsuit. "Deborah had been in jail about a year before this, and it was all over her record that she was a diabetic. She started getting sick and they knew it, or they should have known it."

This isn't the first time Manning has gone to court for inmates who have died while in county custody. The insurance company for the sheriff's office paid $8.25 million to the family of Scott Norberg, who died in 1996 after a struggle in a restraint chair. Manning was their lawyer. And he has another multimillion-dollar case involving an inmate named Charles Agster, who died in 2001.

Arpaio spokesman Jack McIntyre told me Wednesday, "Manning's usual delivery - and it's the same here - is fabrication, conjecture and flights of fancy. Dead bodies are flights of fancy? I don't know that it works for anything other than to attract media attention." I was told by McIntyre and another department spokesman that the sheriff doesn't control Correctional Health Services. Then again, on its own Web site, Correctional Health Services calls itself "an agency . . . responsible for providing health care services to those incarcerated in Sheriff Joe Arpaio's jails." Not the Maricopa County jails, but Sheriff Joe Arpaio's jails.

"It was in jail that Braillard's problems became evident," Manning said. In his notice of claim Manning says that Braillard's distress became so intense that she was moved from her cell to another room after other inmates complained about her moaning. MacIntyre, on the other hand, points out that the standard intake form for Braillard, who had been arrested on drug charges, does not list her as diabetic. "It's what she self-reported," MacIntyre said. "We've tried to get the board of supervisors to fund for crystal balls, but they haven't come up with the money."

Manning said that he doesn't believe the form. He said that Braillard never hid her diabetes. He plans to file a lawsuit on behalf of Braillard's daughter and father. "My fervent hope is that someday the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors will do something about what goes on in the jails," Manning said.

I wouldn't count on it. County supervisors either ignore horror stories coming out of the lock-up or treat them with the same indifference as the family of Deborah Braillard claims that she was treated. Perhaps because they, too, believe it is "Arpaio's jail." Which would be fine only if all of this wasn't paid for with our money.

Report here


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