Ten people died while in custody at the Multnomah County Jail in 2022 and 2023, as compared to zero deaths in the preceding two years. Too many times, preventable deaths – whether here locally or elsewhere – are the result of protocols not being followed or people otherwise not doing their jobs. When that kind of failure leads to an inmate or detainee’s death, that could represent a federal civil rights violation. For the families of those inmates/detainees, restorative justice may be available by pursuing legal action, aided by representation from an experienced Oregon civil rights lawyer.
One of those detainees who died in the Multnomah County Jail in 2022 was Stephen Murphy, who was awaiting trial on federal drug charges. At the time a fellow inmate found him unresponsive, the man was suffering from severe internal bleeding. A coroner’s autopsy discovered that the detainee had a tumor in his liver that had burst.
The sheriff’s department initially listed Murphy’s cause of death as “natural causes,” but later changed it to “overdose.” Willamette Week reported that Murphy had 7.4 ng/ml of fentanyl in his blood when he died. (The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Chief Medical Examiner considers 3 ng/ml or more enough to list overdose as a patient’s cause of death, in the absence of any other diseases.)