The Docket: Deadly Indifference?

In this edition:

• A lawsuit over a death at the Orange County Jail
• The state Supreme Court on COVID vaccination
• Jefferson Griffin goes back to court

It’s been five years since Tiffany King lost her 34-year-old son. But walk through her Durham home or take a look at her arms, which are covered with tattoos commemorating her son, and it is as if Maurice King is still here. 

But one tattoo in particular reminds her that he’s not—22:22, military time for exactly when her son died on March 4, 2020. At the time, Maurice King was a federal inmate awaiting sentencing for drug charges at the Orange County Jail in Hillsborough. 

A federal lawsuit his mother filed alleges that after another inmate assaulted him, detention officers neglected to check on King for an hour and a half while he suffered in his cell with cuts and bruises on his face and struggling to breathe. More than two hours passed before he was taken to Duke University Hospital, where he died minutes after arrival, the lawsuit alleges. 

Last month, U.S. District Judge Catherine Eagles in Greensboro issued a ruling paving the way for a trial to go forward. But the plaintiffs have appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. 

But as Michael Hewlett reports, for now, Tiffany King is still waiting.

Suit Alleges Deadly Indifference At Orange County Jail

Five years ago, Maurice King died while in custody on federal charges. His mother is fighting to make sure someone is held responsible for the failures that led to his death.

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Vax and Opinions

In a Friday ruling to allow a Guilford County high schooler and his mother to continue their lawsuit against a local school board and medical society that administered a COVID vaccine to the teen, North Carolina Chief Justice Paul Newby quoted U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.

“During the COVID-19 pandemic, ‘we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country,'” Newby wrote in a nod to Gorsuch’s statement in Arizona v. Mayorkas, a case about a policy barring migrant entry to the U.S.. “‘Fear and the desire for safety are powerful forces. They can lead to a clamor for action—almost any action—as long as someone does something to address a perceived threat.’”

In the case at hand, he wrote, “medical workers affiliated with a public school forcibly vaccinated a fourteen-year old boy despite knowing they lacked consent from both the child and his mother.”.

Tanner Smith was a football player at Western Guilford High School in 2021 when the school informed players and their parents that a cluster of COVID cases had been identified. Team activities were immediately suspended, and all players were required to get tested to return to practice. Smith’s stepfather said he drove the then-14-year-old to a clinic to get a COVID test. They said they were not aware that vaccines also were being offered and had no intention of getting one, and did not give consent for him to be vaccinated.

Smith and his mother, Emily Happel, sued the Guilford County Board of Education and the Old North State Medical Society, a 138-year-old medical society for Black physicians and individuals that operated the clinic. 

The trial court judge dismissed the case, citing the federal Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act of 2005 that allows the U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services to issue a declaration protecting certain individuals and entities from liability during public health emergencies.

An appellate court panel upheld the trial court decision. But the state Supreme Court agreed to take up the case.

“Clinic workers nonetheless attempted to contact the child’s mother over the phone to obtain consent to vaccinate her son,” Newby wrote in the ruling released last week. “Happel did not answer, at which point one of the workers instructed another to ‘give it to [Smith] anyway.’’

The Guilford school board and medical society cited the PREP Act as granting them immunity from such claims. But the state Supreme Court considered whether his state constitutional rights had been violated.

“First, we agree that the state constitution protects a parent’s right to control her child’s upbringing, including her right to make medical decisions on her child’s behalf,” Newby wrote. “At this point, there can be little doubt that our State and Nation have each fiercely guarded parental rights and consider them integral to the preservation of liberty and justice.”

Newby’s opinion goes further, stating “the constitutional right to full ‘custody and control’ over one’s minor children would ring hollow if it did not include the right to consent on the child’s behalf, as well as the right to seek a constitutional remedy when the State disregards the absence of that consent.”

Justices Trey Allen and Richard Dietz signed on to Newby’s majority opinion. While Justices Tamara Barringer and Phil Berger Jr. agreed with the conclusion that opens the door for the lawsuit to proceed through the courts, they wanted to roll back immunity protections for the clinic workers in that situation.

Democratic Justices Allison Riggs and Anita Earls dissented, describing what their colleagues on the bench did as “turning somersaults” to reach their conclusion that the federal PREP Act did not “exclude state constitutional claims.” 

Riggs and Earls acknowledged the “troubling nature” of the facts of the case and that the child and parents had “every right to be outraged at their losses of physical and parental rights.” But they added that the majority was limiting the scope of congressional intentions for the PREP Act and instead legislating from the bench. “[T]he majority sees no irony in preaching, we are ‘a government of the people, not of the judges.'”

—Anne Blythe

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Griffin Goes Back to Court

On Friday, three N.C. Court of Appeals judges heard Jefferson Griffin’s case for why they should discard 65,000 votes from last year’s state Supreme Court election—the only 2024 race in the country not yet certified.

Griffin’s arguments in the long-running dispute are already familiar. This time, he got to try them out in front of a different audience.

Jeffrey Billman fills us in on the most recent round of court arguments.

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Around The State