Court stymes ACLU's mental illness effort

A federal appeals court dealt a setback Friday to the American Civil Liberties Union in its effort to force broad reforms to how El Paso County treats mentally ill jail inmates.

A three-judge panel of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver upheld a lower court's ruling that denied the ACLU's motion to have mentally ill inmates treated as a class.

Class action status would have allowed the ACLU to argue for sweeping changes, such as requiring the county to "provide safe and appropriate housing for prisoners with serious mental health needs." Without that status, the organization's National Prison Project can proceed in court only with individual inmate complaints.

County officials have argued there's no need for additional protections for mentally ill inmates.

"At the time the suit was brought, as is the situation now, the mental health services available to inmates in the El Paso County jail was among the best available in the state of Colorado," Gordon Vaughan, an attorney for the county, said in a prepared statement.

Friday's decision doesn't mean the case, called Shook vs. Board of County Commissioners of El Paso County, is over. It's been going back and forth through the federal court system since it was filed in 2002. The ACLU will ask the entire court to hear arguments in the case, staff attorney Amy Fettig said Tuesday.

"There's no possibility of really getting the type of systemwide relief that the Shook case asks for without using a class action model," Fettig said.

The suit names inmates who were allegedly denied medication to treat mental illnesses, denied psychiatric care, inadequately monitored for suicidal behavior or improperly confined to a special detention cell.

It sought to represent all people "with serious mental health needs who are now, or in the future will be, confined in the El Paso County jail."

Judge Neil Gorsuch, writing for the three-judge panel, upheld the federal District Court ruling that certifying the inmates as a class would be impossible because "there was no single policy or procedure to which all were subject."

Creating orders to reform the jail based on only the plaintiffs' widely varying complaints would require a "stratospheric level of abstraction," Gorsuch wrote.

El Paso County keeps about 1,525 inmates at the Criminal Justice Center, 2739 E. Las Vegas St.

About 10 percent of the 24,526 inmates housed in the jail from October 2005 to September 2006 were identified as having the most serious or threatening symptoms of mental illness.

-

Contact the writer: 636-0187 or perry.swanson@gazette.com