A federal judge rejected Elbert County’s attempt to dismiss a disability rights lawsuit against it earlier this month, after a woman alleged she sustained further injuries after being forced to walk home 8.8 miles from the jail overnight.

Amy McCraken has a prosthetic limb from a prior leg amputation. She alleged a sheriff’s deputy stopped her on the night of Aug. 1, 2022 for having expired registration tags, and then saw that McCraken appeared to have a revoked driver license. McCraken’s lawsuit noted prosecutors later dismissed both charges.

After her arrest, jail personnel eventually allowed McCraken to use the phone at 2 a.m. Her son in Denver paid her bond, but could not retrieve her in a vehicle. Despite a Colorado law permitting sheriff’s offices to keep someone in jail if they cannot leave safely, McCraken was told to leave and that she would not receive a ride home from law enforcement.

“Ms. McCraken had no choice but to walk 8.8 miles from the jail to her home, on uneven dirt and gravel roads in the middle of the night,” her complaint alleged. The journey through rural Colorado caused her prosthetic leg to break and gave her serious injuries.

McCraken sued the county for a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act. She argued her disability was obvious and, therefore, deputies were required to reasonably accommodate her. They failed to do so by delaying her ability to make a phone call, ejecting her from the jail and refusing to provide her with a ride.

In seeking to dismiss her claims, the county argued that, in essence, McCraken was responsible for what happened to her.

“Ms. McCraken could have found a bench, or grassy patch under a tree to lay in until she could get a ride; she could have stayed in the parking lot; she could have stayed in the lobby; she could have waited to post bond until she could get a ride home; she could have properly changed the license plates on her vehicle according to State law to avoid being arrested in the first place,” the county’s lawyers wrote.

Moreover, it is “not the jail’s duty to ensure that every person released from the jail gets home safely, and in this case had no duty to Plaintiff to provide transport to her once she posted bond after midnight.”

In a July 11 order, U.S. District Court Judge Nina Y. Wang identified multiple problems with the motion to dismiss. First, the county had not even addressed McCraken’s claim under Colorado’s anti-discrimination law. Second, the county responded with its own factual allegations about what happened, which is not normally appropriate.

However, Wang ultimately decided McCraken’s claims should proceed because the ADA forbids public entities to exclude or to deny the benefits of services, programs and activities to anyone on account of their disability. The county argued that giving a released detainee “a ride home from jail at two in the morning” is not a service it provides. McCraken countered that the sheriff’s services, broadly, include protection and safety.

“Here, it is clear that the Parties disagree not only as to whether Plaintiff was denied the benefit of a ‘service, program, or activity,’ but also as to the threshold determination of just how broadly to construe and define the alleged service, program, or activity,” she wrote. “But neither Party engages with the text of the ADA or frames their argument in a manner appropriate for the (dismissal) stage.”

Wang advanced McCraken’s claims with the opinion that it would be better to address whether the ADA applied to McCraken after the discovery of evidence is complete.

The case is McCraken v. Board of County Commissioners.