Denial of Medical Treatment for Seizures in County Jail

Attorney Answer

Your son may have real claims on two separate tracks — a federal civil rights claim for deliberate indifference to a serious medical need, and a California claim that must be preceded by a formal notice filed with the county within a strict window. The timing on the second one matters as much as the underlying facts.

A person held in jail before conviction can sue under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for deliberate indifference to a serious medical need. The statute supplies the vehicle; the right itself comes from the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause and is evaluated under an objective standard — whether a reasonable official in that position would have recognized the risk and failed to respond reasonably. A convicted prisoner's claim arises under the Eighth Amendment instead, so his custodial status matters.

On the state side, California Government Code § 845.6 generally shields public entities and their employees from liability for failing to furnish medical care to a prisoner, with one exception: an employee who knows or has reason to know that a prisoner needs immediate medical care and fails to take reasonable action to summon it is liable, and the entity is liable through respondeat superior. The limit is real — that section reaches the failure to summon care, and California courts read it narrowly rather than extending it to inadequate treatment once care has been summoned. That matters here, because the jail appears to be actively characterizing his seizures as feigned rather than simply not responding at all.

There may also be a disability angle. Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, 42 U.S.C. § 12132, applies to state and local correctional facilities and bars excluding a qualified individual with a disability from a public entity's services, programs, or activities. Threatening disciplinary lockdown for a seizure the jail refuses to treat as medical could implicate it — but courts distinguish a failure-to-accommodate claim from a complaint about the quality of medical treatment, which is not actionable under Title II, so the framing matters.

Timing is its own problem. California Government Code § 911.2 requires a claim for personal injury against a public entity to be presented within six months after the cause of action accrues, before any state-law suit can proceed. That requirement does not apply to the federal § 1983 or ADA claims, which run on a different track.

What you can do

1. Contact a civil rights or prisoner's rights attorney now, given the claim-presentation window — many handle these cases on contingency. 2. Request his complete jail medical records in writing, including any documentation of the decision to reclassify his seizures and the move off the medical ward. 3. Obtain his outside medical records documenting the brain injury and seizure diagnosis, to establish that the condition is real and was documented before he entered custody. 4. File a written grievance through the jail's internal process now, in addition to seeking outside legal help — it creates a paper trail. 5. If he is disciplined or placed in lockdown after a seizure, document the date, time, and circumstances immediately.

A note on timing: the claim-presentation window runs separately for each incident, and relief for a late claim is sometimes available within a longer period if the window is missed. Because he has been in custody for a long stretch, some of what happened may already sit outside it. Don't work this out from a calendar yourself — have a California civil rights attorney confirm where each claim stands right now.