By David Simpson
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
DEKALB COUNTY, Ga. — A federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit filed by the children of an elderly schizophrenic man who was beaten to death in a cell at the DeKalb County Jail.
U.S. District Judge Thomas W. Thrash Jr. ruled the three sons of Hoyt Jenkins had no case under federal law, even though they might have been able to prove to a jury that jail officials should have realized it was dangerous to put Jenkins, 71, in a cell with Jason Corey Smith, 24.
Jenkins was a frail white man awaiting transfer to a mental hospital after being judged incompetent to stand trial for threatening police officers. He had a history of shouting racial slurs and threats in the jail.
Smith was a newly arrived black inmate who had attacked an inmate earlier and seemed paranoid.
After their first night in the same cell, Jenkins was found dead on the morning of July 7, 2004. Smith was charged with murder, but he claimed self-defense and was acquitted by a DeKalb jury in September 2006.
“In hindsight, it is easy to say that there was a risk that Smith would harm Jenkins,” Thrash wrote in a ruling last week. But he added that Jenkins’ family had “no evidence that any of the individual defendants subjectively believed that such a risk existed,” and so no one could be sued under federal law.
The family also alleged that jailers deliberately placed Jenkins in harm’s way to retaliate for his racist and violent behavior, but Thrash said they offered no evidence to back up that claim either.
DeKalb Sheriff Thomas Brown said Tuesday the ruling upheld his position that jailers did not deliberately violate any rules in handling Jenkins.
“We book 40,000 people [into the jail] a year,” Brown said. “Every once a while when you’re dealing with those kind of numbers, you’re going to make a mistake. This was nothing but a tragic mistake.”
The Jenkins family’s lawyer, Christopher Moorman, said he would consider an appeal of Thrash’s decision. “The issue would be what did the guards know, and what might fairly be attributed to them as something they knew,” he said.
Jenkins’ death brought to public attention a backlog of inmates in jails across the state awaiting beds in mental hospitals. State officials promised improvements, but another DeKalb inmate, Joshua Hazelton, died at the jail in January after waiting two months for a transfer.
Hazelton’s death was blamed on natural causes, but Brown issued one-day suspensions to three jailers for failing to adequately monitor him.
Copyright 2007 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution