In a trial underway in front of U.S. District Court Judge Kimberly J. Mueller, plaintiffs want a jury to find nine corrections department employees liable for malice and oppression to rectify abuses they say their client suffered during a brutal 2012 cell extraction.
“Since at least 1995, CDCR officials, medical providers, and custody officers have been on notice that the Constitution requires prisons to provide incarcerated persons with necessary mental health care and to treat prisoners in a humane manner that does not punish them for mental illness,” plaintiffs lawyer Lori Rifkin wrote in her trial brief.
Rifkin said the videotaped 2012 cell extraction of her client, Jermaine Padilla, who was seen being pepper sprayed and dragged out screaming and strapped naked to a gurney for 72 hours, demonstrated that “almost two decades later, CDCR had still failed to correct these constitutional deprivations."
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Padilla’s lawyers filed the case in 2014, nearly two decades after the late U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence K. Karlton in the long-running Coleman v. Brown class-action lawsuit found the state’s treatment of mentally ill prisoners in violation of Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment.
The Padilla lawsuit came a year after the class-action lawyers obtained videos of six cell extractions, including his, in which psychiatrically impaired prisoners were pepper sprayed in their cells. One of them at Mule Creek State Prison, Joseph Duran, later died, and his family and won a $750,000 settlement.