San Quentin News

Written By Incarcerated - Advancing Social Justice

State to pay $1.5 million to family of prisoner who committed suicide

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California has agreed to pay $1.5 million to the family of Erika Rocha, whose prison suicide was deemed foresee- able and preventable, the Sacramento Bee reports.

“This is an acknowledgement that the system completely broke down when it came to providing the care that she needed,” said Lori Ritkin, an attorney on the federal court lawsuit.

Court records indicate that Rocha had eight suicide attempts between age 7 and 14, according to the Aug. 18 article.

“The entire leadership team of California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) from the secretary all the way down to the warden of this particular prison had known for decades that her mental health especially at California Institute for Women (CIW) at Corona, Calif., was below standard, and they chose not to address it,” said Ritkin.

Erika’s troubled youth stemmed from her mother not being in the home, and her father was incarcerated. She lived with various family members and was moved into foster care due to sexual abuse by a family member.

At age 15 in 1996 she shot and wounded the woman that was running the group home where she lived.

She was sentenced to 19 years negotiated plea sentence for attempted murder. During her time in prison, she attempted suicide many times, the newspaper reported. Her suicide watch on March 31, 2016 lasted only one day, in lieu of the procedurally required five-day step-down, according to the Bee.

Prison mental health physicians diagnosed Rocha as hav- ing a number of mental health ailments including antisocial personality disorder, psychotic disorder, and major depressive disorder, according to the lawsuit.

Rocha’s behavior seemed to escalate as she was reported punching a locker. Erika also refused to take her prescribed medication and fought with her cellmate, according to the article.

“Mom on my way home when you pick me up, I want you to take me to a park, and I want you to push me in the swings and roll me in the grass”

In the opinion of Erika’s mother, she didn’t seem suicidal and was looking forward to coming home.

“When I saw Erika at one point and she was talking about coming home,” said Linda Reza, her mother. “She told me, ‘Mom on my way home when you pick me up,

I don’t care where, but just somewhere along the way I want you to take me to a park, and I want you to push me in the swings and roll me in the grass,’” said Reza.

“By doing the settlement so early in the case, before we even went through discovery and for this much money, they know they failed my sister,” said a sister, Geraldine Rocha. “It wasn’t really about the $1.5 million; that really doesn’t do anything for us mentally or emotionally.”

“The exact amount of the settlement is $1,501,500, which includes $1,500 the family wanted to pay for a swing set to be built in Las Flores Park in La Verne,” said her stepmother, Linda Reza.

They would like a message engraved on a plaque at the swing that states, “In loving honor of Erika Rocha, Nov. 7, 1980, to April 14, 2016,” ac- cording to the article.

Some prisoners suffer another form of death penalty

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An alarming number, 80 prisoners, died in Texas jails in a nine month period between Oct. 1, 2017 and July 1, 2018, according to the Bureau of Justice statistics, in an article published by Prison Legal News.

The Texas Commission of Jail Standards (TCJS) is an agency that sets the standards for Texas jails to follow. They perform annual inspections of local jails and prisons. TCJS is also responsible for investigating the deaths in the jails and prisons.

“We shouldn’t look to the TCJS to do what they were never intended to do. We’re putting all our eggs in one basket” said Michele Deitch, lecturer at the LBJ School of Public Affairs in Texas. Deitch is in favor of a statewide ombudsman for the prisons, jails and families, according to the article.

Although the TCJS is responsible for investigating the deaths that occur in Texas jails, no jail was found at fault for any of the 80 deaths. TCJS performs procedures such as: video evidence and documentation review to see if any standards were violated, according to the article.

The investigations can be troublesome. Kenneth Paxton Jr. of the Office of the Attorney General had to order Sheriff Sally Hernandez to comply with record requests. The sheriff’s office had made claims that to provide such information would threaten the security of the guards and its jails.

The sheriff utilized a Texas law loophole that prevents any information, even in death, being released on a person not convicted of a crime, according to the article. Legislation has introduced a bill to prevent this tactic being used in the future.

In 2015, Sandra Bland committed suicide in the Waller County jail. The jail settled with a $1.9 million settlement resulting from her death. The county also created a new law called the Sandra Bland Act, which created policies and procedures for dealing with people with mental health issues.

In 2015, three LaSalle Correction guards in McLennan County were arrested for changing jail logs to appear as if they were in compliance with the mandatory head counts every 30 minutes.

Michael Crittenden, Christopher Simpson and Milton Walker were the guards alleged in the tampering of documents. The charges were prompted by the suicide death of Michael Angelo Martinez on Nov. 1, 2015.

The video from the prison showed the aforementioned guards logged in headcounts they did not perform, reported the Prison Legal News.

“We weren’t checked every hour or every half hour. At maximum we would see the jailers twice a day,” said Barbara Nixon, a nursing student housed at the Anderson County Jail. Adding, “They’d come at the beginning and the end of their shifts. We’d also see them when they brought meals, but that was about it.”

The TCJS standards had recent violations with the Harris County Jail, in which four detainees were left and locked in a transport van overnight in April, 2017. This was followed by the December, 2017 suicide of Maytham Alsaedy, who was scheduled for a guilty plea on capital murder charges.

Debora Lyons committed suicide in August ,2018. In 2019, Evan Parker hanged himself at the Waller County Jail. One month prior to his death, the prison was found to be in non-compliance of several operating standards.

This is the same facility where Sandra Bland committed suicide four years earlier and where the Sandra Bland Act began.

Some attributed the prison deaths to low pay and under- staffing. The commission later was asked for a pay increase by Anderson County Sheriff Greg Taylor, who hoped to recruit more guards to remedy understaffing.

The annual pay was in- creased from $27,000 to $30,000, which is still around $3,000 below the state average pay.

Nevada man commits suicide after his pleas for execution are denied

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A Nevada man who pleaded for his execution killed himself when his wish was denied.

Scott Raymond Dozier, 48, was found hanged in his cell on Jan. 5 at Nevada’s maximum security prison in Ely, prison officials told the New York Times.

“I’ve been very clear about my desire to be executed… even if suffering is inevitable,” Dozier said in a handwritten note to a state court judge. The judge postponed Dozier’s execution in 2017 over concerns that the “untried” combination of drugs could “leave him suffocating, conscious and able to move,” according to The Associated Press.

Dozier was convicted in 2002 for killing a man in Las Vegas. At first, he appealed his death sentence. But after two years, he changed his approach and instead pushed for his execution date.

Dozier had insisted the state set a date, even if it meant a painful death from a cocktail of lethal-injection drugs. The cocktail contained a mix of drugs including fentanyl, which led manufactures to intervene, saying that they would suffer “grave reputational harm if its products were used in the execution against its wishes,” according to the Times.

The complexity of Dozier’s case has placed Nevada at the top of the national death penalty debate, shedding light on the practices of some states attempting to use drugs that pharmaceutical companies do not want used for executions, the AP reported.

Dozier had abandoned his appeals for the death sentence he received in 2007 for the separate murders of two drug associates in 2002 in Phoenix and Las Vegas, the AP reported.

“Just get it done, just do it effectively and stop fighting about it,” Dozier told the AP in a telephone interview last August.

Filmmaker Edgar Barens, who was working on producing a documentary on families affected by the death penalty, told the Times that “the prospect of eking out his existence on Death Row for the rest of his life was unfathomable to him.”

Dozier’s mental health had deteriorated after several delays and after being frequently kept in isolation or on suicide watch, attorney Tom Ericsson told the Times. “He was just so beat down by the prison system and ready to call it a day,” Ericsson said.

Attorneys argued that Dozier’s deterioration was attributed to unconstitutional treatment of their client, the AP reported.

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