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A wrongful death lawsuit was filed Tuesday in Sacramento federal court over the 2005 suicide of 18-year-old Joseph Daniel Maldonado, whose hanging became a symbol of the dangerous conditions faced by wards in the state's juvenile prisons. The suit alleges the Sacramento youth had been on 24-hour lockdown for eight weeks when he hanged himself, that his pleas for mental health treatment went unheeded and obvious signs that he was attempting suicide were ignored for 38 minutes. State prison officials "failed miserably in their moral and legal duty to provide for the care and well-being of Maldonado, a ward of the state," the civil suit charges. Filed by attorney Stewart Katz on behalf of Maldonado's family, the suit names as defendants the former secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Roderick Hickman; the agency's former director of institutions and camps, Yvette Marc-Aurele; and the superintendent of the N. A. Chaderjian Youth Correctional Facility in Stockton, Eric Umeda. Maldonado's mother, Sabrina Perez, and his sister, Renee M. Nunez, seek an unspecified amount of monetary damages. The complaint draws heavily from a report of the California Office of the Inspector General that lashed corrections personnel over the circumstances surrounding the Sacramento youth's death. On Aug. 31, 2005, the teenager was found hanging from the bunk of his single-occupancy cell with a bedsheet wrapped around his neck. At the time, he and other Latino wards "had been confined to their cells essentially 24 hours a day for approximately eight weeks without access to exercise, education, mental health treatment, visitation or any other mandated services," according to the complaint. The lockdown followed an outbreak of gang violence in the institution, in which Maldonado had no part, and "was undertaken with the design and purpose of psychologically breaking down the wards," the complaint alleges. "Maldonado's suicide was a foreseeable consequence of the calculated psychological torture inflicted upon him." Some of the most violent youth offenders, many of whom are gang members, are housed at Chaderjian, known simply as Chad. When entering Chad, nonviolent wards such as Maldonado "had no other choice than to at least nominally affiliate with a gang to obtain protection," the complaint alleges. Wards were pressured to renounce their gang affiliations in return for relief from the 2005 lockdown, it adds. "Renouncement of gang affiliation is viewed by gang members as an act of war against the gang and opens the (ward) to an immediate and continuing threat of death or great bodily injury against himself and/or his family. "Impaled upon the horns of this deadly dilemma," Maldonado chose suicide, the complaint declares. At 6:15 p.m. that day, staff conducted a routine welfare check and saw that Maldonado had covered the window of his cell. He did not respond to either knocks or verbal commands, yet there was no attempt to enter the cell and the situation was not immediately reported. When a sergeant was notified, he delayed communicating the situation to the watch commander and dispatching a team to investigate. "As a result," the complaint alleges, "38 minutes had elapsed from the time staff recognized Maldonado's unresponsiveness until (someone) finally entered the cell. These unconscionable delays were antithetical to the purpose of the welfare check and guaranteed the success of Maldonado's suicide attempt." From the time he went into state custody on April 5, 2004, following "several minor vehicle-related offenses," to the time of his death 17 months later, Maldonado "had on four separate occasions requested mental health services," the complaint alleges. "However, Maldonado received neither the mental health care he requested nor even a referral for assessment, which would have resulted in his properly being classified and placed in a special treatment unit more capable of addressing his serious ... needs," it alleges. A spokesman for the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation's Division of Juvenile Justice referred a request for comment to Deputy Attorney General Monica Anderson. Beyond confirming that she will be handling the defense of the case, Anderson had no comment Tuesday. A spokeswoman for the attorney general's office referred the request back to the corrections agency. At the time of Maldonado's death, the Stockton prison, along with the state's entire incarceration system for young criminals, had come under intense scrutiny by the Legislature, the courts and watchdog agencies. The December 2005 report on his death was the third issued by the inspector general in less than a year that blasted Chad specifically and the practices generally of the Division of Juvenile Justice, previously known as the California Youth Authority. As with the previous reports, corrections officials did not quarrel with the findings in the Maldonado report and promised to try to improve the system. In a prepared statement, the state's top juvenile justice official, Bernard Warner, called Maldonado's death "a tragedy" and characterized the report as "an indictment of the violent and tense conditions that existed at the facility during that particular time." Following the suicide, Warner said, violence at Chad had been on the decline and extended lockdowns were eliminated. |
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