• Yes. The California Government Tort Claims Law requires the preservation of a state government tort claim to all the agencies you are planning on filing a lawsuit against within 6 months of the date of loss. If you don’t present a tort claim with the agency responsible, you may be barred from alleging state law causes of action such as Negligence, Battery or even the Ralph Bane Act. However, even if you fail to present a claim within 6 months but are still within 12 months from the date of loss, if certain exceptions are met, you can file a late claim within 12 months of the incident date.

What if I never submitted a government tort claim within the allocated time frame?

• You can still sue under federal law so long as you file the federal claims within 2 years of the date of incident.

• Sometimes, when the cause of death is questionable or foul play is suspected, a second private autopsy arranged by the family may be helpful in seeking quicker answers to a cause of death and/or making sure that an accurate forensic examination is conducted especially when the death followed a physical struggle with law enforcement. The private medical examination is paid for by the family but may be a worthy expenditure to preserve an honest finding of the real cause of death. Separate blood toxicology testing may sometimes be requested if there is a question as to whether the deceased was under the influence of drugs and what quantities of drugs were in fact in the person’s body at the time of death

• Medical reports, both jail and outside hospital records, can be a source of vital information about the events and medical conditions a person had prior to passing away. Often times the family members of a loved one are provided very little information by County and jail officials under what is seemingly a cloak of secrecy. That is why it is vital to have an experienced attorney with a strong medical background who understands medical terminology and who can piece together what happened to an inmate prior to his expiration. Also, medical charting notes are frequently written in a ”CYA” manner especially when there is clear medical neglect on the part of the medical staff. Therefore, medical records can be very helpful when putting together a factual narrative explaining what medical care an inmate should have been given long before the inmate drops dead in his cell and a man-down is called.

• Attorney Cameron Sehat has taken a particular liking to the medical aspect of cases, particularly when it comes to understanding and explaining the medico-legal feature related to physical and psychological injuries stemming from a third party’s misconduct.

• Sometimes when a person dies immediately after a physical altercation with the police and the person’s blood test positive for substances, the county medical examiner will rubber-stamp the cause of death and claim the death was solely due to substance intoxication even with nominal amounts of drugs in their system. This is intended to distract from the conduct of the police officer’s use of force which immediately precipitated the death of a person.

• It is therefore important to understand both the science and mechanism of death and have a good command of the medicine in order to demonstrate that the county coroner’s rubber-stamped cause of death in the autopsy report is incorrect. For example, more often than not, whenever a person dies in the custody of police officers or jailers, and a substantial use of force was applied immediately preceding the death, seldom will a county coroner attribute the use of force as an additional cause of death; all it takes is for the person’s toxicology test to test positive for drugs for the cause of death to be exclusively “death due to drug intoxication”. Therefore, it is of utmost importance, in cases of police excessive force during which a person dies after a significant amount of force is used but where the person was also under the influence of an intoxicant, to prove the coroner’s cause of death left out a vital use of force as another contributory cause of death. These are challenging cases as the county coroner, who sometimes is also employed by the offending police agency, will likely be biased in favor of law enforcement, and will seldom impute fault upon the agency for causing the death. Therefore, you have to master an understanding of the medical aspect of the case in order to go toe-toe with professional witnesses who are trained to testify with a bias against your case.

• The short answer is yes. The problem with holding and restraining someone on their stomach for an extended period of time is that it restricts their ability to breathe, especially if the person is deemed overweight and additional weight is pressed on their back. When this happens, the person’s oxygen saturation can rapidly decompensate and they will asphyxiate due their bodies’ inability to take in enough oxygen. To add insult to injury, frequently when a person dies after being held for long period of time in a prone position or after being in a chokehold, the county coroner will rarely attribute the primary cause of death to the officers. Often times, the officers/deputies involved in the use of force are employed by the same agency county as the medical examiners, and hence, you can see the clear conflict of interest between the County’s interest and the medical examiner who took a medical oath to truthfully investigate his findings. That is why it is crucial to take the deposition of the county medical examiner, once a lawsuit is filed, to elicit testimony that can even the playing field and demonstrate how much of a contributory factor were the officers’ use of force in causing a loved one’s death.

• A trial lawyer needs to have a great command of the medicine involved in your particular case, especially if your loved one died as a result of a complex but avoidable medical condition due to the neglect of those in charge of his/her welfare. As you have to explain intricate and complex medical conditions to lay people, you have to be able to explain a complex subject and break it down into a simple subject.

• Other examples of mastering the medicine involves inmates whose known medical condition have been deplorably neglected by the correctional staff resulting in either a serious aggravation of their condition or sometimes resulting in death. The jail facility will always blame the inmate claiming their death in custody was unavoidable and merely a coincidence of the person being in custody. This is oftentimes an absurd defense when you can prove that an inmate suffered from an urgent medical condition but was ignored, and through the use of medical experts you can establish that had the inmate received timely medical care, the victim more likely than not would have survived.

• Correctional nurses and doctors have a duty to treat and provide  timely healthcare  to inmates. A correctional officer has a duty to safeguard the inmates under their watch and to report an inmate in physical distress to medical staff.   The inmate, who does not have the option to choose his medical provider nor to summon “911” , is exclusively reliant upon those in charge of their custody. And when these professionals fail to uphold their standard of care, it is the inmate/patient who suffers the consequence of their failure.

• Again, it is a travesty that in each and every case during which an inmate is left to die in a cell, such neglect and dereliction of duty is directly caused by deliberate indifference of the medical and correctional staff. Seldom will the county coroner attribute any fault upon those who were in immediate charge of the inmate.

• That is why the best recourse against these types of misconduct is to file a civil rights action against the offending agency and their employees. These types of cases often time will rely upon a 14^th or an 8^th Amendment violation against cruel and unusual punishment in which a person’s medical care has suffered as a result of the offending correctional staff’s deliberate indifference to a serious medical condition.