ST. LOUIS, November 18, 2010--The American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri (ACLU-EM) has filed a civil suit against the City of St. Louis and Correctional Medical Services (CMS), the medical provider for the city jails. Filed on behalf of an HIV-positive inmate at the Medium Security Institute in St. Louis, the lawsuit cites life-threatening deliberate indifference to a serious medical condition. The inmate was incarcerated in late winter of this year, and for the first sixteen days of his incarceration was denied the life saving medication for which he has a daily prescription. During that period he was given only Tylenol, despite repeated attempts by him, a friend, and his doctor to re-establish his prescribed medical regime.
At the end of that initial sixteen-day period, while he started to receive his prescriptions, the inmate endured repeated and substantial periods of time during which his full prescription regime was not administered. Such a denial of adequate treatment can have dramatic and negative health consequences and can ultimately prove fatal to HIV-positive persons, who can quickly build resistance to medications that are not continuously taken.
Brenda Jones, Executive Director of the ACLU-EM, commented on this situation: “No one deserves to have his life endangered simply because he is awaiting trial in the City jails. The case fits a repeated pattern of CMS’s deliberate indifference to inmates, resulting in inadequate medical care.”