California: pregnant inmate lost baby after jail staff allegedly ignored calls for help for 2 hours and then stopped at Starbucks en route to hospital

[PurgatoryOfPotholes]

Quinones filed a complaint against Orange County, California, in April 2020, alleging wrongful death and infliction of emotional distress in the death of her child.

Quinones was in Orange County jail and six months pregnant on March 28, 2016, when her water broke, according to the complaint.

She pushed the call button in her cell with no response for two hours, the complaint said. Staffers at the jail failed to call an ambulance and transported her to the hospital on a “non-emergency basis,” it said.

She accused the defendants of acting with “deliberate indifference” to her medical needs — including stopping at a Starbucks on the way to the hospital, instead of taking her directly there.

Quinones and her baby were hospitalized and her child died, the complaint said.

The case was dismissed in October 2020 with prejudice upon the grounds that her claims were barred by California’s two-year statute of limitations and she didn't sufficiently support her claims.

NBC news

She has now been granted financial compensation, but surely we can all agree that no amount of financial recompense can ever outweigh such an ordeal. It should never have happened.

This is just awful.staff have a duty of care to the inmates. Prison is the punishment. Its not for staff to decide they should inflict their own by ignoring calls for medical attention.

Prisoners whatever they have done are still entitled to receive healthcare just like everyone else.

Drs,prison staff, etc do not have the right to play judge jury and executioner. If you can't accept that you shouldn't be in the job.

Should absolutely never have happened 😢

It's another case of an already marginalised vulnerable woman being further abused by the state because they couldn't care less about her or her baby.

A 2 year statute of liabilities is very short. I wonder if that's the norm across the states of the US.

Heartbreaking. Sad echoes of similar stories here in the UK.

That's horrible :(
How do these people live with themselves?

While reducing access to abortion.

Why are women's prisons failing to meet the most obvious healthcare needs of women?

Pregnant woman in labour? You get her to a maternity unit! This is not an obscure little known medical condition. If they can't deal with that, what else are they failing women on?

I guess these kinds of jobs will always attract certain kinds of people. Not like any back ground check would really show awful opinions or a want to control/exert over vulnerable people. Between that and the whole " sticking together/protecting your own" thing that makes it difficult to raise concerns, you are left merely hoping that the people you employ will be fair and do their jobs without resorting ro their own agendas.

Helen Joyce mentioned this (statute of limitations) on her podcast with Michael Shermer. Iirc she said a lot of states shortened them because of the false memory contagion where lots of people were falsely accused of child abuse. She was worried that a lot of medics are going to get away with the “gender affirming” surgeries because of this short time limit.

This is just sick.

Just awful. I can't imagine the terror and total loss of control in that situation, doing everything you can to access help but unable to get the support you need.

Pregnant women just shouldn’t be in prison, time and again they have been placed in life threatening positions due to not being able to access healthcare.

@inkjet is there nothing that can be discussed without being deflected to trans issues? This has nothing to do with trans, and statutes of limitations vary from state to state and are different for criminal and civil matters. Trans individuals will not be able to sue in the US until those kinds of surgeries have what is known as a standard basis of care. Currently, it's all experimental.

Anyway. This is one of the things I can't stand about this forum. It's all trans, all the time. When it should be about this poor fucking woman and what was done to her.

One post. One post out of all the replies and you choose to comment on it first and amplify it. If you don't like other people mentioning a topic, then ignore them and make your post solely about your preferred topic. There's no discussion on this thread about that topic, it was one comment in one part of one post, that no one else responded to.

Roses, if you don't like my post then ignore it and make your post about your preferred topic.

I'm not wrong and this happens to almost every thread.

This is such a valid point. It's a double punishment and in this case of this women had the most tragic outcome.

Then don't post here.

I was just mentioning what I thought was relevant info to the case when someone mentioned statute of limitations. I appreciate I didn’t have to add the bit about the surgeries, I could have used a different example.

Anyway back to the woman. This is horrific. There seems to be such disregard for pregnant women in prison. Didn’t a woman give birth in her cell in the UK?

Yes. The baby died. The mother was a teenager on remand, i.e. not even convicted of anything. And now she has the life sentence of being a bereaved mother.

I'm not sure if it can be cited as a specifically feminist issue, but statutes of limitations that that set narrow timeframes for bringing an action, must disproportionately affect those who are most entitled to ask for a legal remedy.

Getting yourself together enough to pursue any sort of legal action after such a traumatic experience, coupled with baby loss, isn't something you can do overnight, is it?

if you’re going to imprison women then you need to be able to handle them being pregnant and giving birth. That’s part of the reality of being a woman

sadly things are no better here in the UK. The recent Nuffield Trust report on healthcare for women in prison found that 11% of pregnant women prisoners went into pre term labour (vs 6.5% in the general population), and more than 20% of midwifery appointments are missed due to lack of staff to accompany the mother.

it’s bloody, bloody awful