Alaska DOC ‘negligent’ in trial over jailed woman’s suicide attempt, but jury awards family $0

A trial over a woman’s suicide attempt while jailed in a state facility in 2020 recently concluded.

According to the Anchorage Daily News, Ninilchik resident Gabby Chipps had been arrested on assault charges and jailed for several weeks when she tried to take her own life by hanging in an isolation cell. Chipps lived, but she suffered permanent injuries that left her disabled. Then her family sued, saying the state had not done enough to prevent the suicide attempt.

The lawsuit came amid increased scrutiny of inmate deaths in Alaska. In 2022, a record of 18 people died in state custody, including at least seven by suicide.

Anchorage Daily News reporter Michelle Theriault Boots wrote about the lawsuit by Chipps’ family, and she says the trial was a unique window into how the Department of Corrections deals with Alaskans in crisis.

(If you or someone you know is dealing with a mental crisis or suicidal thoughts, you can call the Alaska Careline at 1-877-266-HELP or the national 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.)

Listen:

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This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Michelle Theriault Boots: So I think within a year of the suicide attempt, her family filed a lawsuit, basically accusing the Department of Corrections of medical malpractice or negligence, essentially in caring for Gabby, and saying basically that they did not effectively diagnose or treat her mental health concerns, and that that allowed her, gave her the opening, to attempt suicide, which led to the permanently disabling injury.

Casey Grove: You mentioned that there was this year (2022), this record number of suicides in Alaska prisons and jails. And I feel like we’ve heard from other families, similar things, but have other folks filed lawsuits?

MTB: I know of at least one or two other lawsuits that I think the ACLU is involved in related to suicide in the Department of Corrections and just mental health care. But this was an interesting one, because it made it all the way to the trial stage. And what I’ve noticed, you know, covering the Department of Corrections and deaths for over a decade now, is that often when people die in the custody of the state of Alaska, and you know, maybe their family files a lawsuit, they ultimately, the state will usually settle with them. So the family might get a payment for $400,000 or $600,000 or $800,000 in exchange for agreeing to drop the lawsuit.

Now that did not happen in this case. The lawsuit went forward to the trial stage, and starting in October, there was a month-long trial, which really was a rare window inside the Department of Corrections and how it renders health care to the inmates that it’s charged with having in its custody.

CG: So the state then is in a position of defending itself in civil court. What did the state’s lawyer say? And I guess, also, that wasn’t just a state lawyer, that was an outside, private attorney, right?

MTB: Yes, the state contracted with an Anchorage law firm — Birch, Horton, Bittner and Cherot — for its defense in this case. And what I was told by the Department of Law is that this was obviously a major case. The demand was, I think, $35 million ultimately, and so the state needed to defend itself. And because of understaffing, they contracted with outside counsel, the attorney defending the state.

Their real message was, you know, not all suicides can be predicted, and that the Department of Corrections acted within the scope of the standard of care that it is supposed to give inmates who have mental health issues in its prisons. And another point that was repeatedly made in the time that I spent watching this is that a huge proportion of the inmates that are cared for by the Department of Corrections in Alaska do have some kind of mental illness or mental health issue or are in some kind of crisis. And so the state was essentially arguing, “There’s no way we could have predicted this, and there is no practical way to put every single inmate, or some great proportion of thousands of inmates, on the highest level of suicide, (or suicide) prevention restrictions.” That was kind of their argument.

CG: It seems like the state was kind of in a position of having to defend its internal policies and corrections and how it deals with these things. And I just wonder if there were things that you caught on to through this trial that told you a little bit more, informed you, about how Corrections deals with mental issues.

MTB: Yeah, I think, I mean, there were things like we got to see big, you know, on the screen, this is the form that someone would fill out if someone was displaying concerning behavior and got pulled into an evaluation of some kind. These are the questions that would be asked.

You know, we learned things, like one of the plaintiffs’ points that they return to again and again, is that Gabby Chipps was placed in a solitary confinement cell by herself, which is not best practice with a suicidal person. There’s a known link between inmate suicide and solitary confinement. And we also learned that her last meeting, the only time she saw an actual psychiatrist, it lasted for all of three minutes and 40 seconds. And the state had a response to that, saying, you know, the psychiatrist is sort of only managing medication. It’s their very experienced clinicians that are doing the bulk of the actual conversation or therapy with an inmate. But the specificity of that was a very unusual window into how these things work.

CG: So the first version of this story that I saw, that you had written, was that this trial was going on and that the jury was now deliberating. That was last week, and since then, (they) have gotten a verdict in this case. And it’s kind of this weird thing, and it kind of happens in civil lawsuits and civil cases, where, you know, somebody might ask you, “Well, who won?” you know, and it’s not that simple, right?

MTB: It’s not that simple. So the jury took, I think, less than a day to deliberate, and they found that the Department of Corrections was negligent, but that the Department of Corrections negligence did not substantially contribute to the injury that Gabby Chipps suffered, and they awarded $0 in damages. So it could be said that they found very much in favor of the state and the Department of Corrections, because the Department of Corrections was, you know, the state was up for losing up to $35 million in this case. But they did find the Department of Corrections was negligent.

Now we don’t know much more about that, because they fill out, they literally check a box on the jury form. So we don’t know without doing, kind of, some post-trial juror interviews, we don’t know exactly what they thought was negligent and why they decided the way they did. But the Department of Law certainly considered this, I think, a win for the state. They put out a statement saying that this was a tragic event, but you know, quote, “Her injury is not the state’s fault simply because she was inside a state facility. Sometimes tragic events happen, and no one is to blame,” Alaska Attorney General Tregg Taylor said in the statement.

For their part, Gabrielle Chipps’ mom, Holly Chipps, you know, she described the case as very painful and raw and said, you know, this isn’t just her daughter’s story but the story of others who have been lost to suicide or injured in suicide in prisons.