![]() Notarianni: Well, even with all of those unknowns in place, legal experts are saying this could be a first-of-its-kind class-action suit. If this is appealed, then that puts things on pause for a very long time, more than likely. Most cases can’t be appealed until the case is entirely done, but there are some rules that could allow the state to try to seek an appeal. ![]() It’s probably the biggest unknown right now, whether or not the state will seek an appeal on this. Notarianni: What could this lawsuit eventually mean for the plaintiffs: those thousands of Oregonians who contracted COVID-19 while they were incarcerated and for the families of people who died in state custody?Ĭhavez: You know, this is a remarkable thing to say after two years, but it might be too early to tell, to be honest. Otherwise, the courts would also be facing 5,000 separate lawsuits. So, the only way that this case could properly be managed would be through a class action. The problem started at the top if the problem started at the top, it affected everybody downwards. They weren’t shy about saying that on a number of occasions. We sued the top-level officials for DOC, and we sued them because they did indeed have a heavy hand in how it is that the pandemic response was managed in DOC. In this case, we were very particular with who it is that we were suing and what it is that we were saying was the problem. What was she looking to establish in order to permit this lawsuit to move ahead?Ĭhavez: Well, the biggest question in every class action is whether everybody’s more or less in the same boat, in terms of what kind of claims can they bring and what kind of defenses the will defendants use. Magistrate Judge Stacie Beckerman issued a ruling just about a week ago, on April 1st, and said that it has a green light that this class-action suit can go forward. Notarianni: Yeah, and there are a number of criteria that need to be met for a class-action suit to be able to go forward. Unfortunately, the court rejected that motion for an injunction, and that’s why we filed the damages class action in addition to this. We brought an injunction that we were hoping the court would order the department of corrections to institute some measure of social distancing, masking rules, and other protections that we knew folks needed. And so, a lot of folks were suffering, and it was just not being abated. I think we were, at its height, the third-worst per capita on death. Notarianni: Broadly speaking, how has the Oregon Department of Corrections response to this pandemic stacked up against what’s been happening in other states?Ĭhavez: The Oregon Department of Corrections, during the height of the pandemic in the winter of 2020 into 2021, was one of the worst states for deaths and transmission across the country. So, a few of these folks, all of whom had some pre-existing condition that would make them medically vulnerable to COVID-19, decided that they needed to act now and get the protections ordered by a federal court so that they could be safe. They’re not going to be able to be distant from one another, they can’t stay at their homes, they can’t limit their exposure to other folks. That became an immediate concern given what prisons are: these folks can’t leave. I don’t know if we knew precisely how communicable, how it was transmitted, but the best we could understand was it was transmitted by being in close proximity to each other. Juan Chavez: At the beginning of the pandemic, I think we understood that this was a communicable disease. That’s when a group of people who contracted COVID-19 in custody decided to sue the state. John Notarianni: This lawsuit initially began way back in April of 2020, actually. He recently spoke with OPB Weekend Edition host John Notarianni about the case. Chavez is one of the attorneys representing the prisoners in that lawsuit. Last week, a federal judge approved a class-action lawsuit over the state’s response to the pandemic inside Oregon’s prisons. Another 5,000 people have tested positive for the virus while in custody. ![]() Since the beginning of the pandemic, 45 people in the custody of the Oregon Department of Corrections (DOC) have died after testing positive for COVID-19. Last year, a report from the Prison Policy Initiative found that the COVID-19 mortality rate for incarcerated Oregonians was five times higher than it was for the state’s general population. His next case could potentially be worth millions of dollars for people incarcerated in Oregon and their families.
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