Alfredo Miranda v. County of Lake


In the United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit ____________________ No. 17-1603 ALFREDO MIRANDA, Administrator of Estate of Lyvita Gomes, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. COUNTY OF LAKE, et al., Defendants-Appellees. ____________________ Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. No. 12 C 4439 — Sharon Johnson Coleman, Judge. ____________________ ARGUED DECEMBER 6, 2017 — DECIDED AUGUST 10, 2018 ____________________ Before WOOD, Chief Judge, and EASTERBROOK and HAMILTON, Circuit Judges. WOOD, Chief Judge. In the fall of 2011, Lyvita Gomes failed to show up for jury duty. This minor infraction triggered a series of events that led to her untimely death in the early days of 2012. She wound up in the county jail, where she refused to eat and drink. The medical providers who worked at the Jail did little other than monitoring as she wasted away in her 2 No. 17-1603 cell. By the time she was sent to the hospital, it was too late to save her. Alfredo Miranda, the administrator of Gomes’s estate, brought an action under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and assorted state- law theories against Lake County, the Jail officials (the “County defendants”), and Correct Care Solutions (CCS, the Jail’s contract medical provider) and its employees (the “med- ical defendants”). The district court dismissed the County de- fendants at summary judgment. The medical defendants pro- ceeded to trial, but halfway through the proceeding the court granted judgment as a matter of law under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 50(a) for them on some claims. The Estate pre- vailed to a modest degree on another claim, and part of the case resulted in a mistrial. Our principal ruling in response to the Estate’s appeal is that the Rule 50(a) judgment was prem- ature, and so further proceedings are necessary. I A On October 12, 2011, an officer arrested Gomes, a 52-year- old Indian national, for failing to appear for jury duty. (In hindsight, this was the County’s first misstep: as a non-citi- zen, Gomes was categorically ineligible to serve as a juror. 705 ILCS 305/2(a)(4).) Gomes pulled away from the officer as he attempted to arrest her. That action earned her a second charge of resisting arrest. The officers took Gomes to Lake County Jail, where she made statements that landed her on suicide watch the next day. But she did not stay at the Jail long. On October 14, Gomes was transferred to the custody of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) ser- vice, which released her within a few days. No. 17-1603 3 Roughly two months later, on December 14, after failing to appear in court on the resisting-arrest charge, Gomes found herself back in the Lake County Jail. Though officials initially placed her in the general population, it quickly became appar- ent that her physical and mental health were deteriorating, and so she was moved. On December 16, CCS’s Director of Mental Health, Jennifer Bibbiano (a social worker), performed a mental health evaluation on Gomes. ...

Original document
Source: All recent Immigration Decisions In All the U.S. Courts of Appeals