By Frank G. Runyeon

Law360 (April 24, 2020, 2:43 PM EDT) -- Inmates at a Brooklyn federal prison, including one with COVID-19, claim their pleas for medical attention went unheeded for days, according to an attorney for vulnerable detainees who inspected the locked-down facility on Thursday.

Katie Rosenfeld says she heard consistent claims of medical neglect during a court-ordered inspection to examine conditions her clients call unconstitutional, which was conducted alongside a correctional health expert and an attorney for the Federal Defenders of New York, an organization that represents indigent inmates, at the Metropolitan Detention Center.

The inspection is a fact-finding effort ordered by U.S. District Judge Rachel P. Kovner in a lawsuit by medically vulnerable inmates seeking release from the prison, where an outbreak of the coronavirus has sickened six inmates and 26 staff as of Thursday.

"We definitely spoke to people who said that they had been reporting that they had been sick for many days and that they were being ignored, including someone who was then diagnosed with coronavirus," Rosenfeld told Law360 shortly after exiting the 1,700-inmate facility.

The inmates' attorney said the inspection team spoke with more than 10 inmates in cell-side interviews, wearing masks and goggles for protection. Rosenfeld said she participated most actively in the discussions with inmates who are the most sick.

One inmate told the team that he had "repeatedly requested medical care for five days and been ignored" until he was diagnosed with coronavirus and put in isolation, Rosenfeld said.

Even though movement has been greatly restricted at the facility as an infection control measure, the attorney noted, the man had a cellmate when he was requesting a doctor and was in contact with other prisoners and guards for showers and phone calls.

"Their standard operating procedure there is to minimize and deny medical care, and I think unfortunately it seems that has extended into this pandemic, which is obviously really dangerous," Rosenfeld added.

"When you're trying to manage an infectious disease in a jail setting, it doesn't seem like it's good practice to ignore people's complaints of cardinal symptoms," Rosenfeld said.

The attorney added that many inmates were confined to their cells in de facto solitary confinement, noting that "to be locked in your cell for 24 hours a day is normally reserved for extreme punishment," but the pandemic has added yet another dimension of concern for their well-being.

"People are scared about coronavirus in general," Rosenfeld said, remembering one man with asthma who feared "that something bad could happen to them and they would just be ignored, or no one would know or do anything."

Rosenfeld cautioned that the correctional health expert's report to the court, set to be filed next Thursday by Dr. Homer Venters, will provide his official analysis of conditions at MDC on behalf of the inmates, an examination of infection control measures and the results of the inmate interviews.

In a Friday hearing, the other attorney present at the inspection — Deirdre von Dornum of the Federal Defenders of New York — told a judge in a separate lawsuit that two COVID-19-positive inmates had also been denied phone calls to their families and attorneys since being isolated.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.

The tour of the locked-down federal facility included an examination of various wings of the detention center, which houses both pretrial detainees and sentenced prisoners. On-site visits have been banned and communication restricted since the lockdown began in mid-March in response to the pandemic.

A newly amended emergency class petition before Judge Kovner claims the Brooklyn prison has violated vulnerable inmates' Fifth Amendment or Eighth Amendment protections against "deliberate indifference" and cruel and unusual punishment by failing to enact basic COVID-19 safeguards.

Release, the inmates argue, is the only means of protecting them from MDC's "unconstitutional treatment" because continued incarceration "in conditions where it is virtually impossible to take steps to prevent transmission of an infectious disease ... will prove deadly because of petitioners' vulnerable condition," according to the inmates' refreshed writ of habeas corpus filed Thursday.

The inmates' attorneys have argued that a lack of testing likely means far more inmates are infected with the novel coronavirus than is currently known — just 12 inmates have been tested as of Thursday, while MDC had 1,665 inmates as of Friday, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Law360 has found inconsistent COVID-19 testing protocols in prisons across New York, where federal prisons have said they follow guidance not to test mild or moderate cases, while local jails and state prisons say they will test their symptomatic inmates.

The class of vulnerable inmates is represented by Alexander A. Reinert and Betsy R. Ginsberg of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, and Katherine Ruth Rosenfeld and O. Andrew F. Wilson of Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady LLP.

The government is represented by James R. Cho and Seth D. Eichenholtz of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York.

The case is Chunn et al. v. Edge, case number 1:20-cv-01590, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

--Editing by Jack Karp.

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