You wouldn’t seek ethics advice from Bernie Madoff or marital tips from Mark Sanford.
Likewise, when hiring an expert on how to run a jail, you’d think twice about a man who’s under federal investigation.
Unless you’re the city and county of Denver, flailing to defend its wayward lockup and desperate for a hired gun to justify its callousness.
Such is the strategy of Mayor John Hickenlooper’s administration against a suit brought on behalf of three deaf inmates imprisoned without sign-language interpretation. One of them was unable to communicate with jailers for a month in 2005 when he hanged himself in his cell.
As its main expert witness, the city has hired Michael Haley, warden of Alabama’s Mobile County Metro Jail, who moonlights trying to vindicate prisons in civil-rights lawsuits. The former president of the World Evangelism Bible College and Seminary charges at least $2,000 a day for his services.
City policy — in addition to federal law — promises interpretation for deaf people dealing with city government. Denver has a full- time sign-language interpreter on its payroll.
Still, Haley dutifully defends a system that failed to provide an interpreter to inmates who knew how to express themselves mainly through signing.
In the case of Shawn Vigil, deputies were aware he was deaf but apparently didn’t notice he was functionally illiterate. No one seemed to mind that he couldn’t read the “intake questionnaire” well enough to understand a question asking if he had a disability. No one corrected the form when he answered “no.” The jail left blank forms for his medical and mental-health screenings.
Vigil, 23, was facing sex-assault charges when deputies isolated him in a dark cell at the end of a block and failed to conduct, or at least document, rounds required twice an hour.
“If he was trying to tie a sheet around his neck, nobody would have seen him,” says Paula Greisen, attorney for Vigil’s mom. “They made it impossible for him to understand what was happening to his life.”
Two other inmates died in Denver jail within a month of Vigil’s death — one of an overdose and the other at the hand of a fellow prisoner. The city reported zero jail deaths in its 2005 report.
It apparently also didn’t do basic research on Haley.
As it turns out, the U.S. Justice Department has spent six years investigating the warden and his jail for civil-rights abuses. In a 43-page report, the feds threaten Mobile County with a lawsuit for violations that include failing to address inmates’ medical and mental-health needs. Under Haley’s watch, that jail’s suicide rate is twice the national average. Officials slammed him for refusing to cooperate with their probe.
What’s more, courts twice have found Haley — also a former state corrections chief — to be “deliberately indifferent” to prisoners’ welfare, and three times have held him in contempt for not following court orders. One judge found him “patently inadequate” in his attempts to address “massive danger posed to inmates.”
The good warden refused to comment Wednesday.
As for the city, it once again has stuck its head in the sand, both on jail policies and the legal troubles of its own expert.
“We don’t talk about witnesses while a case is pending,” says litigation director Luis Corchado.
Denver has messed up. And, in our names, Hickenlooper’s administration continues paying a man who has broken one jail to make make excuses about what’s wrong with our own.
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
