A federal judge allowed a man’s use-of-force claim to proceed against Clear Creek County sheriff’s deputies, who reportedly choked and nearly asphyxiated him in the jail prior to his conviction.

Manuel Alejandro Camacho alleged while he was awaiting a court appearance in the county jail in Georgetown on May 15, 2019, a sheriff’s deputy inflicted pain on him by trying to attach a leg shackle. Camacho’s ankle was reportedly swollen and disfigured from a prior accident, but the deputy ignored Camacho’s complaints that the shackle was pinching his skin.

Other jail staff then reportedly “took me to the floor” and choked Camacho. Camacho claimed the deputies kneeled on him. “I could not breath [sic],” he wrote in his complaint, because “they nearly asphyxiated me short of death.”

The deputies finally put a nylon strap around his ankles, cutting off Camacho’s circulation, and placed a helmet on his head, allegedly choking him with the strap.

The next day, Camacho filed a grievance about the encounter. He wrote his his court complaint that it went ignored.

In November 2020, after asking about the status of the grievance, Capt. Jeff Smith wrote back to say he thought Camacho wanted the matter “handled administratively,” and that sheriff’s employees “are presently doing scenario based training.”

One month later, Camacho filed a federal lawsuit against the deputies alleging violations of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment and a liability claim against the sheriff’s office for failing to train its employees.

“It was unprovoked and absolutely no non-force alternatives were attempted,” Camacho wrote of the incident, requesting $407,000 in damages and de-escalation training for sheriff’s employees. “I want to prevent this from happening to anybody else.”

The sheriff’s office asked the court to toss Camacho’s lawsuit, arguing he should have appealed the jail’s handling of his grievance before suing. In addition, the defendants argued, the Eighth Amendment does not apply to pretrial detainees like Camacho, and the deputies were entitled to qualified immunity.

“Without other instances of injuries similar to Plaintiff’s, the Office could not have been on notice that any of its training (or, as Plaintiff alleges, lack thereof) could cause injuries like Plaintiff’s,” the defendants wrote.

U.S. Magistrate Judge S. Kato Crews issued a recommendation on Nov. 2 agreeing that there was no apparent policy or custom in the sheriff’s office of violating detainees’ constitutional rights for which the office could be held liable. However, Crews declined to dismiss Camacho’s Eighth Amendment claim.

It was a common mistake, he wrote, for self-represented pretrial inmates to bring claims under the Eighth Amendment, when in reality the Fourteenth Amendment governs excessive force allegations in such scenarios. Prior to securing a conviction, the government may not inflict punishment on a detainee who is presumed innocent.

Because the defendants had not offered a proper argument for the alleged Fourteenth Amendment violation, Crews recommended denying qualified immunity to the deputies. Neither Camacho nor the defendants objected to that conclusion and U.S. District Court Judge R. Brooke Jackson adopted it on Nov. 23.

Following the encounter at the jail, Camacho pled guilty to vehicular eluding.

The case is Camacho v. Cordova et al.