By Cory Shaffer
Advance Ohio Media
CLEVELAND — A group of Ohio prisoners on Friday filed a potential class-action lawsuit asking a judge to free thousands of inmates susceptible to serious illness from the coronavirus.
The lawsuit accuses Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and the state’s prison director, Annette Chambers-Smith, of violating their constitutional rights by failing to do more to prevent a deadly outbreak of the COVID-19 virus that as of Thursday left 58 prisoners and two staffers dead.
“The skyrocketing infection rate within Ohio’s prisons demonstrates that the State’s current policies are not functional, but, rather, are subjecting tens of thousands of Ohioans to infection, serious medical complications and the statistically significant possibility of death,” the lawsuit claims.
Attorney Joseph Patituce of the Strongsville-based Patituce Law Firm filed suit in U.S. District Court in Columbus on Friday. The suit asks a judge to order the release of thousands of inmates serving time on low-level felonies, who are older or have medical conditions that put them at risk of serious illness or death if they contract the virus. It also requests the release of inmates deemed a low-security risk and those who served the majority of their sentences.
Patituce told cleveland.com on Friday that the prisoners are not after money.
“This is to keep people from dying in a prison cell when they shouldn’t,” Patituce said.
DeWine’s spokesman, Dan Tierney, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday afternoon.
DeWine has garnered high praise for acting swiftly and decisively since the early days of the virus, which since its first cases in early March, infected at least 26,954 Ohioans and killed 1,581. The governor and public health director, Amy Acton, issued public health orders that banned gatherings of more than 10 people and required people in public places to practice social distancing, among other measures, and have gradually begun lifting those orders in recent weeks.
The state’s prisons experienced some of the most concentrated outbreaks of any facilities in the nation. The 28 prisons house more than 48,000 inmates. The state has tested 7,807 prisoners as of Friday, of which 4,485 have tested positive, according to the state prisons website.
The most significant outbreaks have been at prisons in Marion and Pickaway County, where more than 80 percent of inmates have contracted the virus, according to the state.
Lawyers at Patituce’s firm and another Northeast Ohio law firm asked DeWine in April to grant reprieves to the same categories of inmates as the lawsuit seeks, warning that failure to take broad actions would result in humanitarian and constitutional crises.
DeWine’s office has identified fewer than 200 prisoners for potential early release, and the governor last month commuted the sentences of seven inmates, including former GOP operative Tom Noe, who had served 14 years of an 18-year sentence for his conviction in the “Coingate” scandal.
“For the vast majority of prison who aren’t politically connected, this seems like their only option,” Patituce said.
The lawsuit asks the judge to order the release of any prisoners who has valid diagnoses from a doctor of a host of illnesses, including chronic lung disease, moderate to severe asthma, serious heart conditions, diabetes, severe obesity, renal failure or HIV, AIDS or cancer.
For other inmates, it asks for the release of serving time on felonies of the fifth and fourth degrees, the lowest-tier charges. Those serving time on third-degree felonies would be eligible for release if it is their first felony conviction or if they have served at least half of their sentence under the lawsuit’s proposal. The lawsuit seeks release for those inmates serving time on first- and second-degree felonies who are over 55 years old and have served the greater of 10 years or two-thirds of their sentence.
Prisoners convicted of rape and murder would only be eligible for release if the prison has not deemed them a security threat, they are over the age of 55 and served the greater of the minimum term of their sentence or 25 years behind bars.
A federal judge in Cleveland has ordered the U.S. Bureau of Prisons to release more than 800 vulnerable inmates out of a federal prison in Elkton where an outbreak of the virus has killed nine.
Officials in Cuyahoga County scrambled in March to reduce the population of the chronically overpopulated county jail from 1,900 inmates to just over 1,000 inmates. The jail has seen 126 inmates test positive.
———
©2020 Advance Ohio Media, Cleveland