In May of 2020, the American Civil Liberties Union; the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee; Donati Law Firm; Just City, and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP filed a federal class action lawsuit against the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office and the Sheriff of Shelby County under the Fourteenth Amendment, the Americans with Disabilities Acts, and the Rehabilitation Act regarding concerns about the plaintiff’s safety while detained in the Shelby Country Jail during the COVID-19 Pandemic. To protect medically vulnerable people and people with disabilities who are at high risk of severe injury or death from COVID-19 complication, we sought to have the vulnerable individuals held at the jail to be promptly identified and released from detention.
In July 2020, an inspector was appointed by the court to inspect the Shelby County Jail and testify about the conditions at the jail. The jail was given an opportunity to remedy some conditions noted. In December 2020, the parties agreed on certain new policies and protocols concerning COVID-19 procedure. However, the defendants believed the protections negotiated were no longer applicable once the first doses of COVID-19 vaccines were offered to people in the jail on April 15, 2020; even though there was no other compliance with the agreed upon procedure and an extraordinarily low number of detainees in the jail overall had received the vaccine, with an estimated refusal rate of 90% at the time.
The court found that the agreement would end when the detainees were no longer in danger, either because the pandemic was over or because an effective vaccination program had resulted in meaningful acceptance of the vaccine. It was then up to us to show that the vaccination program at the Shelby County Jail was not operational. We relied on the inspector’s reports of an ineffective program and on detainee statements of the nature of the educational materials and incentives provided for vaccination to show their efforts were completely inadequate.
As such, a new agreement was made with updated regulations for the jail to follow in February 2022; with jail administration continuing to struggle in vaccine education and administration and mask distribution. With continued change to the COVID-19 landscape, a new agreement was made in June 2023 that bound the Shelby County Sherriff and the Sheriff’s Office by reporting and inspection requirements.
PLAINTIFF(S):
Favion Busby, and Michael Edgington (class representatives)
DEFENDANT(S):
Sherriff of Shelby County Floyd Bonner, Jr., Shelby County Sheriff’s Office
ATTORNEY(S):
Donati Law Firm: Brice M. Timmons
Just City: Josh Spickler, Wesley Dozier;
University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law: Steven John Mulroy;
Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP: Joseph Bial, Darren Johnson, Meredith L. Borner, David Kimball-Stanley, Eric Abrams;
ACLU: Andrea Woods, Nancy Rosenbloom, Jennifer Wedekind, Amreeta S. Mathai;
ACLU- CA: Zoe Brennan-Krohn;
ACLU-DC: Maria Morris;
ACLU Foundation of Tennessee: Thomas H. Castelli, Stella Yarbrough
