Appeals court affirms dismissal of Harris County Jail suicide case

A federal appeals court last week affirmed the dismissal of a lawsuit accusing Harris County jail guards of failing to adequately care for a man who took his own life in a cell in 2017.

In 2018, Vincent Dwayne Young's family sued Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, as well as a doctor, a nurse and a prison guard, alleging that he suffered from drug withdrawal while incarcerated.

The lawsuit accuses staff of failing to intervene before his death, even though a prison guard had described him as “depressed” the day before his death and he had been hospitalized hours before his death for treatment for high blood pressure, a symptom of his withdrawal symptoms.

Young, 32, hanged himself after returning to prison from a hospital stay.

An attorney for Young's family did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

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Young's death sparked local protests, and a Harris County jail guard was fired in connection with the suicide. When the lawsuit was filed, lawyers criticized the jail for consistently being understaffed and underfunded. The criticism has continued for years, as the jail has been found to consistently fail to comply with state regulations on inmate supervision.

Young's family's lawsuit and other court documents provide varying descriptions of the events leading up to his death. The family's lawsuit describes prison guards denying him Xanax and deciding he did not need psychiatric care, even though he complained of racing thoughts and paranoia.

A three-judge appeals court panel wrote that nurses found that Young had told the prison about a history of depression and anxiety but denied suicidal thoughts. He was given medication to slow his drug withdrawal and then pretended to be asleep when guards approached him and learned from another inmate that Young was suicidal.

Young was later found unconscious in his cell, suffering from high blood pressure, the judges wrote. He was taken to a hospital, treated and returned to prison, where he soon took his own life.

After an internal investigation by the sheriff's office, Deputy Abraham Romero was fired for falsifying jail records to make it look like he was doing rounds in the jail. Romero did not check on Young for over an hour, during which time he hanged himself with bedsheets.

According to court records, Romero was the subject of a public corruption investigation in 2017, but a grand jury did not indict him about three months after Young's death.

Young's family filed the wrongful death lawsuit in December 2018. The federal district court granted summary judgment in favor of the county in August 2023 and dismissed the lawsuit.

The appeals court affirmed the lower court's ruling that the plaintiffs did not have standing to file the lawsuit in federal court, in part because Young's mother died before the lawsuit was filed.

The appeals court also ruled that Young's lawyers failed to prove that his doctors had violated his constitutional rights. Young's family argued that his doctor was aware of suicidal thoughts that accompany Xanax withdrawal and failed to give him specific instructions about that possibility when he was transferred to a hospital ward. The court said the standard for judging a constitutional violation is higher and must be more than gross negligence.

Young's lawyers also failed to prove their claims that the county had a “no Xanax” policy that led to Young being denied the drug, contributing to his death, the appeals court judges said. One of the jail's doctors testified that there was no such blanket policy.

After Young's death, the Texas Commission on Prison Standards found that the Harris County Jail did not meet state staffing standards. The commission found that inmates were not observed by jail guards at least once every 30 minutes.

Young's death was one of five suicides that occurred in the prison within two years.

The Commission continued to accuse the prison of inadequate supervision and issued at least one decision for non-compliance with these rules each year from 2020 to 2024.

After a series of inmate deaths in 2022, when 27 people died in the jail, the commission issued a remedial order requiring the county to comply with state standards. The number of jail deaths dropped to 19 in 2023. According to the sheriff's office, there were seven jail deaths that year.