A jury will decide whether Saguache County Sheriff Dan Warwick, one of his deputies and the board of county commissioners are liable for the 2019 suicide death of Jackson Maes in the jurisdiction’s jail.

In a Feb. 3 order, U.S. District Court Judge Nina Y. Wang dismissed a number of constitutional rights claims against the defendants, but she agreed a jury could reasonably find certain sheriff’s officials acted not just negligently, but deliberately to cause Maes’ death. She also took the unusual step of allowing jurors to evaluate whether Saguache County underfunded its jail with the knowledge that constitutional violations were almost certain to occur.

“While uncommon, however, the Court finds it settled that liability may rest against a municipality where deliberate indifference is evidenced by funding decisions,” Wang wrote.

Attorneys for the county defendants and for Sarah Lieberenz, Maes’ mother, did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment.

In 2018, more than one year prior to Maes’ death, CPR reported the Saguache County Sheriff’s Office was “severely underpaid and understaffed,” and voters had recently rejected a tax increase to fund more employees and a new jail to replace the current 66-year-old structure.

“We make do with what we’ve got,” said Capt. Kenneth Wilson, who is one of the defendants in Lieberenz’s lawsuit. “Honestly, we’re killing it for what we got.”

According to the evidence submitted in court, on Nov. 16, 2019, Deputy Elke Wells arrested Maes for failing to appear for a traffic offense. At the time, Maes was intoxicated and Wells transported him to the jail. Although some evidence suggested Maes told Wells he was thinking of killing himself, Wells later disputed that account.

At the jail, another detainee was occupying the “tank,” where people at risk of suicide are typically held and monitored. Instead, Maes went into a normal cell with a privacy curtain. He began banging his head into the wall, prompting Wells, Wilson and Deputy Miguel Macias to investigate.

“I’m trying to kill myself right now,” Maes said.

“You’re trying to kill yourself right now?” Wilson repeated.

As Wilson walked out of the cell, he stated that “something more” needed to be done for Maes.

In response, Deputy Shelby Shields, who was serving as a dispatcher that evening, called a behavioral health facility to assist Maes. No one answered, however, and she did not leave a message.

Instead, Macias stayed with Maes and talked with him. Macias had already announced his intent to resign to Warwick, the sheriff, due to exhaustion and lack of training in the job. At 10:08 p.m., after dropping off snacks for Maes, Macias left the cell.

Less than 15 minutes later, Maes had hanged himself with the privacy curtain. A deputy did not find him until the following morning, dead. He was 27.

Lieberenz, on behalf of her son’s estate, filed several claims against the sheriff’s employees involved, arguing they violated Maes’ constitutional right to adequate medical care. Against the sheriff specifically, she alleged his policies or practices were also responsible for Maes’ death, as was the county board’s underfunding of the jail.

The defendants moved for summary judgment, which enables a judge to resolve a case without a trial if the key, undisputed facts lead to one outcome under the law. They argued the sheriff’s employees were entitled to qualified immunity, which is a judicial doctrine that shields government officials from civil liability unless they violate a person’s clearly-established legal rights.

While lawyers for the defendants acknowledged there were two previous suicides in the jail in recent history, “the Estate has failed to draw any connection between those suicides and a lack of training, much less that any pattern emerged that could connect those suicides to Maes’ brief incarceration in the Jail,” they wrote.

Wang agreed that Shields and Wells were entitled to qualified immunity. Wells, the arresting deputy, had been in Maes’ cell with the others when he announced he was trying to kill himself, but no prior court cases have established that a “single suicidal remark” places an officer on notice of a substantial risk of harm, the judge noted. As for Shields, the dispatcher, her failure to secure mental health treatment for Maes or adequately monitor him may have been negligent, but Wang believed it did not rise to a constitutional violation.

She reached a different conclusion for Wilson. The constitutional standard of “deliberate indifference” requires a government official to know about an obvious risk of serious harm, and then disregard it. There was conflicting testimony between sheriff’s employees about what Wilson knew, but he ultimately heard Maes express his suicidality, watched him bang his head, said “something more” needed to be done, and allegedly was involved in discussions about putting Maes on suicide watch.

Each one of those factors, Wang wrote, would not be enough to show Wilson was deliberately indifferent.

“But the aggregation of these risk factors,” she explained, “leads this Court to conclude that despite the lack of a Supreme Court or Tenth Circuit case … it was clearly established as of November 2019 that prison officials are deliberately indifferent if they fail to take reasonable steps to protect a pretrial detainee or an inmate from suicide when they have subjective knowledge that person is a substantial suicide risk.”

She also kept intact the claims that Warwick failed to sufficiently train his deputies on how to “elevate” care for detainees or remove items that suicidal inmates could use for self-harm. A jury could conclude Warwick knew deputies would confront suicidal people, necessitating both types of training.

A “wrong choice in either of these areas may lead to a deprivation of an individual’s constitutional rights,” Wang noted.

Finally, Wang rejected the idea that the board of county commissioners’ responsibility for the physical layout of the jail gave rise to a constitutional violation. But it was plausible the elected officials underfunded the jail, with Warwick allegedly relying on untrained or unqualified employees as a result. If the board was deliberately indifferent in doing so, and it led to Maes’ death, the county would be liable, Wang decided.

A final conference prior to the trial is set for March.

Last month, Wang issued a separate order declining to impose sanctions on the defendants for getting rid of audio recordings relevant to the case. She agreed the sheriff’s office had the responsibility to preserve the evidence, but believed the missing recordings did not harm the plaintiffs’ case.

She also declined the plaintiffs’ request to consider a scholarly article, not yet published, that suggests qualified immunity should not exist at all for constitutional rights cases because of a previously-undiscovered 19th century clerical error.

The case is Lieberenz et al. v. Board of County Commissioners et al.