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Law360 (June 12, 2020, 4:19 PM EDT) -- Lawsuits against Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, will no longer get a blanket delay to allow employees to focus their attention on the COVID-19 pandemic and must instead be addressed on a case-by-case basis, a federal judge has ordered.
After postponing cases involving several county departments at the start of the coronavirus outbreak, Chief U.S. District Judge Mark R. Hornak on Thursday denied Allegheny County's motion to extend the stay of deadlines on 10 cases involving the Allegheny County Jail, where county attorneys said staff members were still dealing with containing the spread of the highly contagious virus.
"The continuation of the stay in a given case is best considered in the context of each such civil action," Judge Hornak wrote in a brief entry on the docket. "Counsel for Allegheny County shall promptly serve a copy of this order upon counsel for each involved civil action, and shall file a certificate of such service on the docket of each such civil action."
The order, originally applied to more than a dozen cases in March, will be allowed to expire June 16.
Though the county had been previously granted a hold on 16 cases related to the jail, the Department of Emergency Services or the Department of Human Services, Thursday's extension request applied only to 10 cases involving the jail.
"In each of these cases, if the stay were lifted, the jail would be required within the next 30 days to devote significant time, resources and attention to defend the lawsuit," the county's request for an extension said. "Respectfully, this is time, resources and attention that must be devoted now to combating the impact of COVID-19 in the Allegheny County Jail."
The cases the county sought to delay included negligence and medical malpractice suits over the treatment of inmates, a civil rights complaint from a transgender woman being housed with male inmates, and proposed class actions over the alleged disclosure of private health information and the assignment of jail staff to oversee strip searches or areas where inmates of the opposite sex were in states of undress.
There were 28 confirmed cases of COVID-19 among inmates at the jail and six cases among staff members, the county said.
The motion said "extreme measures" were still underway to quarantine and treat sick inmates, in addition to the social distancing and reporting measures required by a consent order in another case — which wasn't on the list where the county was seeking a stay — that claimed the jail needed to do more to protect inmates against the spread of the virus.
Attorneys for the county were also too busy to devote all of their time to the pending lawsuits, the motion said.
"The Allegheny County Law Department is also called upon to divert its resources to providing unique legal advice to various county departments presented by employee-related issues of COVID-19 and needs to be available to perform new work necessitated by the COVID-19 emergency, including the rescheduling of primary elections, and planning on other contingencies, including a sharp increase in mail-in balloting," the motion said.
Judge Hornak's order will leave it to the six judges handling the various cases to decide whether each deserves further delay. The attorney for the plaintiffs in one of the cases, involving a woman allegedly kept in solitary confinement without adequate evaluation or treatment of her mental health issues, said he would oppose waiting any longer.
"They are ready to resume," Bret Grote of the Abolitionist Law Center said Friday. "Their argument for another extension was frivolous. And that place is a human rights nightmare that is rife with constant constitutional violations in every imaginable sphere of operation."
Representatives of Allegheny County declined to comment Friday.
Robert Keach, representing plaintiffs in the private health information suit, declined to comment Friday.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs in the other cases that were no longer being delayed did not immediately respond to requests for comment Friday.
Allegheny County is represented by Andrew F. Szefi and John A. Bacharach of the Allegheny County Law Department.
The case is In re: Administrative Order Concerning Jury Trials and Certain Other Proceedings Relative to COVID-19 Matters, case number 2:20-mc-00394, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania.
--Editing by Janice Carter Brown.
For a reprint of this article, please contact reprints@law360.com.
