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A federal civil jury on April 2 awarded a $307.6 million verdict to a Detroit man who alleges he suffered in prison for more than two years because the state’s former prison health care contractor would not pay to reverse his colostomy.
Former Michigan inmate Kohchise Jackson alleged in a lawsuit filed in 2019 that he had to serve his entire prison sentence with a stinky and leaky plastic bag attached to his side because the state’s former prison health care contractor, Corizon Health, did not want to pay for surgery to reverse his colostomy, as a cost-cutting measure.
A jury deliberated just a little over two hours in federal court in Detroit April 2 before returning the verdict. It awarded $300 million in punitive damages against defendant CHS TX, Inc., the company that purchased Corizon Health after its 2023 bankruptcy, and $100,000 in punitive damages against Dr. Keith Papendick, who was Corizon’s “director of utilization management” while Jackson was in prison from 2017 to 2019. The jury also awarded $7.5 million in compensatory damages against CHS TX.
“I think that this jury recognized the basic human rights and the constitutional rights of everybody,” Detroit attorney Jonathan Marko, who represented Jackson, said after the verdict.
“This is a warning shot across the bow to for-profit health care companies” that get their money from taxpayers, through the prison and jail system, Marko said.
During the trial, a New York City man who was a top official with Corizon, Isaac Lefkowitz, refused to answer questions when he was called to the witness stand, citing his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, court records show.
“This is a criminal enterprise,” Marko told jurors during his closing argument. Lefkowitz “was scared of being criminally prosecuted in this courthouse.”
Adam Masin, a New York attorney representing defendants CHS TX and Papendick, told jurors during his closing that Lefkowitz’s appearance in the case was just one of a series of distractions in a trial he called “a circus” and “a spectacle.”
Lefkowitz had nothing to do with Jackson’s lawsuit because he did not become a Corizon official until 2021, long after Jackson was released from prison and the same year the MDOC’s five-year, $716 million contract with Corizon ended, Masin argued. Lefkowitz is also not currently a director of CHS TX and has no current role with the defendant company, Masin told jurors.
The trial also heard testimony from former Corizon employees, not all of whom worked in Michigan prisons, who testified for Jackson and the defendants.
Masin, who declined to comment when reached by telephone after the verdict, described much of the plaintiff’s case as “random, unproven stories … intended to distract you.” He said Jackson’s lawyers “relied too much on self-serving prison gossip.”
The Michigan Department of Corrections was not a defendant in the case.
Jackson, 44, of Detroit, who alleged deliberate indifference to his serious health needs, was paroled in May 2019 after serving two years and two months in prisons near Jackson and St. Louis. He developed a hole in his colon in 2016, before he was sent to prison. It happened while he was in the St. Clair County Jail in Port Huron, awaiting trial on charges that included assault with a dangerous weapon.
Doctors outside prison treated Jackson with a colostomy, which diverted his colon and the human waste it carried to a plastic bag, through a hole in his side. Jackson alleges he was supposed to have surgery to reverse the colostomy in February 2017. Instead, Corizon left him with it. He alleges the bag frequently leaked, sending waste onto himself and his bunk; smelled bad; and he sometimes had to clean out the bag and reuse it when prison replacements were not available, making his prison stay traumatic and dangerous.
“Nobody wanted to be my bunkie, for sure,” Jackson told the Detroit Free Press in a 2019 interview.
“I didn’t get along well with others, because of the bag and the smell,” which resulted in “a couple of altercations,” he said.
Marko said the case was about justice not just for Jackson but for tens of thousands of prisoners who have received inadequate health care while in prison from contractors seeking to maximize their profits. He asked the jury to award Jackson $75 million in compensatory damages and $650 million in punitive damages.
“You have the power to stop them,” Marko said of prison health care providers who have harmed prisoners, in urging jurors to return a large verdict. “Claw back that taxpayer money.”
Masin argued that at least 1 million Americans live with colostomy bags and there is no medical consensus on how quickly a colostomy should be reversed. Performing the surgery would have come with medical risks, Masin told jurors.
What’s clear, he said, was that there was no pressing medical need for the reversal surgery, which Jackson had done after he was released from prison and suffered no ill effects.
It was also false that Corizon would save money by denying Jackson the reversal surgery, Masin said. If approved while Jackson was in prison, the surgery would have been paid for by Medicaid, he said.
“What if this man had a life sentence?” asked Ann Arbor attorney Ian Cross, who also represents Jackson. “Is it fine for him just to wear a bag for the rest of his life?”
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: “Jury awards former Michigan inmate $307.6M in prison health care suit”
