Stanislaus jails pick on inmates of only one race, lawsuit says

Stanislaus County jails treat Latino inmates with prejudice, says a federal class-action lawsuit brought by some prisoners including two suspected murderers awaiting trial more than five years.

In jail, Latino inmates are asked whether they are active or former gang members and housed accordingly without the option of saying neither, the civil lawsuit says. They then are treated differently than white, Asian or black gang members, the document says.

“Virtually no other county or state uses mere alleged gang association or membership to confine prisoners” in segregated housing, the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit also accuses Sheriff Adam Christianson and some of his command staff with violating federal law by depriving some Latino inmates of outdoor exercise and “sensory stimulation,” of using excessive force, and of failing to give inmates a meaningful chance to be reassigned to units with better conditions.

The sheriff did not respond to a request for comment. County Counsel John Doering said the county has a good chance of winning the lawsuit.

“When we implement practices, policies and procedures, we’re looking at the safety and security of all the people at the jail,” including inmates, staff and visitors, Doering said. “We think our actions comply with all aspects of applicable law.”

The lawsuit says Christianson leads “a culture of excessive force” and condones “illegal, unconstitutional and inhumane conditions.” He is named as a defendant along with the Sheriff’s Department and five officers overseeing jails.

The case is on track for trial in a couple of years, although county attorneys persuaded a federal judge in Fresno to toss out a few other allegations. District Attorney Birgit Fladager and the five-member elected Board of Supervisors initially were defendants but were excused from the case earlier this year.

“These (inmates) are people who have not been convicted and they’re treating them worse than people in state prison are treated,” said the plaintiffs’ civil attorney, Amber Lunsford.

Some who might join the lawsuit have been locked in maximum security units up to 10 years while awaiting trial, the document says.

Complaining prisoners, the lawsuit says, have been told, “(You) are not a citizen; you are an inmate” by jail officers, who are custodial deputies with the Sheriff’s Department.

Those suing include Armando Osegueda, 35, and Robert Palomino, 48, who are among seven men charged with murdering three people in an east Modesto home in 2012. Prosecutors seek the death penalty for Osegueda and two others, and allege further enhancements because the slayings reportedly were done to benefit the Norteño gang.

Plaintiffs are “charged with incredibly heinous crimes, and it is for the plaintiffs’ own safety, the safety of all other detainees and jail staff that (they) are housed in maximum security,” says a court briefing filed by county attorneys.

Osegueda and Palomino have long records of causing no trouble in jail, their lawsuit says.

Also suing are David Lomeli, 26, who denies belonging to a gang and has faced robbery charges since April 2013, and Jairo Hernandez, who spent a year in jail before charges against him were dismissed in January.

The case affords a look into life at the county’s Public Safety Center, a lockup southwest of town. For example, pairs of inmates in maximum security share a “cramped concrete” cell measuring 6 1/2 feet by 12 feet with a bunk bed, a toilet and sink, a desk, stool and ceiling light. At times, they’re confined in such cells for stretches up to 80 hours, the lawsuit says.

Each week, maximum-security inmates get three showers and three hours of recreation in an enclosed concrete space with a telephone that each inmate can use four times a month, a television and a window 20 feet up, and no sports or exercise equipment and no seating. The window is covered with a screen or wire mesh and doesn’t allow for “unobstructed sunlight and fresh air, and does not afford detainees an outdoor environment,” U.S. District Judge Lawrence O’Neill said in a recent ruling. That could violate federal lockup standards affording inmates outdoor exercise, O’Neill said.

For more than three years, Osegueda and Palomino got no chance to question their housing assignments, the lawsuit says. That could violate their Fourteenth Amendment right to due process, the judge said, suggesting “timely classification reviews.”

In pretrial motions, the county denied discriminating because gangs are not a protected group like others based on, for instance, age or sexual orientation. Although that’s true, the judge said, jailers still must not show prejudice based on race.

Jail guards under no threat several times used unwarranted violence toward prisoners, the lawsuit says, citing specific dates since 2012 when deputies in corridors allegedly shot pellets or pepper balls into locked cells occupied by inmates. Other times, inmates were forced to kneel up to three hours, court documents say.

Most of those reports, however, won’t come up in court because they were raised after a statute of limitations had expired, the judge ruled. He allowed only one excessive force claim – the most recent, in December 2015 – when Lomeli reportedly was struck in the neck and leg by shrapnel from a flash-bang grenade as guards began a contraband search.

That “does appear to be objectively unreasonable,” O’Neill said in his ruling, quoting from the lawsuit, because “there was no ongoing incident and no known threat to officers, no effort by the officers to temper their amount of force, and no effort by any of the (inmates) to resist.”

Initially, plaintiffs accused Fladager of conspiring with Christianson to subject some Latino inmates “to harsher conditions in order to coerce them” into leaving gangs, snitching on other gang members and angling for plea deals, potentially leading to “false confessions and false evidence.” But O’Neill erased those claims from the lawsuit.

The judge could decide, after a hearing scheduled for April, whether to certify the class, enabling other inmates to join the lawsuit.

This story was originally published June 24, 2017 at 3:47 PM with the headline "Stanislaus jails pick on inmates of only one race, lawsuit says."