A federal judge declined last month to dismiss the claims against numerous prison employees for a man’s in-custody death following several seizures and his repeated ingestion of liquified pain-numbing medication.

The mother and minor children of Victor Esquivel sued the state’s corrections director, prison supervisors, corrections officers, medical employees and a medical staffing firm after Esquivel’s September 2022 death at the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility. The plaintiffs alleged the defendants were deliberately indifferent to Esquivel’s serious medical needs, in violation of his constitutional right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment.

Broadly, the complaint described Esquivel as having a history of mental illness and substance use disorder. He suffered several seizures in the months before his death, which stemmed from melting down lidocaine patches and ingesting the liquid.

Allegedly, the defendants knew this to be a prevalent practice throughout the prison. Moreover, they specifically knew Esquivel was endangering himself. In their various roles, the defendants allegedly failed to treat Esquivel properly, did not refer him to those who could provide suitable care, failed to protect him from known risks or neglected to monitor him adequately.

The individual defendants invoked qualified immunity, which is a judicially created doctrine to shield government employees from civil lawsuits unless they violate someone’s rights as clearly established through court decisions.

But in a Dec. 19 order, U.S. District Court Judge Charlotte N. Sweeney rejected defense counsel’s argument as so brief as to be almost “lazy.”

“Defendants’ cursory assertions of such an important defense,” she wrote, “threaten to undermine its importance and, at worst, insult the individuals on whose behalf it is asserted.”

Otherwise, Sweeney concluded the plaintiffs had credibly alleged the defendants knew about a significant risk of harm to Esquivel and disregarded it. The defendants, represented by various attorneys who advanced similar reasons for dismissal, had attempted to argue that they had no constitutional obligation to protect Esquivel from “exposure to illegal drugs.”

“The first problem with this theory is that, if recognized, it would mean that incarcerated people are entitled to greater protection from the effects of the ingestion of drugs than non-incarcerated people,” wrote attorney Katherine M.L. Pratt for one of the corrections defendants. “This is simply not logical. Were Plaintiff not incarcerated, he could have easily walked into any pharmacy, bought lidocaine patches over-the-counter, taken them home, boiled them, and ingested the liquid.”

The plaintiffs countered that the defendants were misstating the issue.

“This case is about specific known risks to Mr. Esquivel arising from a failure to treat seizure and mental health disorders, combined with housing him in an area where prescription lidocaine exposed him to harm due to his self-medicating of untreated mental suffering,” the plaintiffs’ attorneys wrote.

Sweeney agreed with the plaintiffs’ description of the alleged constitutional violation.

“Fundamentally, Plaintiffs have plausibly alleged that Defendants … all knew the dangers that lidocaine posed to Mr. Esquivel but failed to act in the face of those known dangers,” she wrote.

The case is The Estate of Victor Esquivel et al. v. Williams et al.