Santa Clara Jail Faces Claims From Family of Inmate Who Died By Suicide

A federal judge determined Wednesday that Santa Clara County Jail must face claims that it is liable for the suicide of an inmate in custody. The family of Frederick Regal sued Santa Clara County in 2022 claiming that leading up to Regal’s death in 2020, Santa Clara County Jail had failed for years to comply with court-mandated suicide prevention procedures that could have saved his life, Courthouse News reports. Regal's family focused its lawsuit on the lack of suicide resistant cells, which the jail agreed to build in 2019 to resolve other lawsuits related to its conditions. The county has argued that Regal’s family is attempting to hold it responsible for being unable to predict Regal’s suicide, a task it said was impossible. In a 22-page ruling Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman, a Barack Obama appointee, denied summary judgement to the county, writing that Regal had a Fourteenth Amendment right to be housed with reasonable measures in place to abate the risk of suicide.

San Jose police officers arrested Regal in July 2020 after responding to gunshot reports, and later reported that Regal had fired two guns around 54 times inside his home. He told officers he was under the influence of a substance and asked to speak to a psychiatrist. A health intake assessment documented Regal’s history of mood swings and depression and that he was thinking about suicide. Regal was labeled a "moderate suicide risk" and placed alone in a cell with bed linens and an upper bunk out of guards' sight, with no video or audio monitoring. The county says Regal was checked every 15 minutes as a precaution against suicide, but that on July 29, 2020, he was found by a correctional officer hanging from a bedsheet attached to an upper bunk in his cell. He was transported to a local hospital and placed on life support. He died on Aug. 5, 2020. Freeman wrote that simply providing suicide prevention care did not absolve the county of acting with deliberate indifference. Whether the county's measures were reasonable should fall to a jury, the judge said.