SAN DIEGO — A federal judge is weighing whether a sweeping civil rights lawsuit alleging systemic failures in San Diego County jails should proceed to trial.

At a hearing Thursday before U.S. District Judge Anthony Battaglia, attorneys for people incarcerated in the jails described a system plagued by preventable deaths, chronic understaffing and widespread lapses in care.

The case, Dunsmore v. County of San Diego, began as a complaint from one man over conditions inside the downtown Central Jail. It’s since expanded into a class-action lawsuit alleging unconstitutional medical, mental health and safety practices throughout county detention facilities.

“People are dying because they’re not getting their insulin. They’re dying because they’re not getting their dialysis,” Van Swearingen, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, told Battaglia. “There are not enough staff to attend to them.”

The lawsuit, certified as a class action in November 2023, is challenging nearly every facet of jail operations — from intake procedures and housing classification to sanitation, surveillance and suicide prevention.

“This could be equal to about nine separate lawsuits,” Battaglia said at the start of the hearing.

Two key motions were the focus of Thursday’s proceedings: one from the county seeking to dismiss most of the plaintiffs’ claims, and another from the plaintiffs asking the judge to disqualify several of the county’s expert witnesses ahead of trial.

Notably, the county did not ask the court dismiss the plaintiffs’ claim regarding inadequate mental health care — a significant aspect of the case, given how many of the in-custody deaths reviewed by the plaintiffs’ experts involved people with serious mental illness.

Plaintiffs’ attorneys last week gathered sworn statements from three men who say they witnessed the gruesome death of a mentally ill man in the Vista jail.

Defense attorney Elizabeth Pappy, representing the county, acknowledged that conditions inside San Diego County jails aren’t perfect but insisted they meet constitutional requirements.

“The defense position is, there’s enough staff,” she said. “It would be lovely to have more staff, but whether there’s more staff or not, the question before you is whether the staff that is there is providing adequate medical and dental care.”

A recurring theme throughout the hearing was whether the plaintiffs had demonstrated widespread, systemic problems or whether deaths highlighted in numerous court filings were unfortunate isolated cases.

“Are mistakes made? Of course,” Pappy said. “But you are dealing with a volatile, sometimes extremely dangerous population.”

Plaintiffs countered that the deficiencies are institutional and the Sheriff’s Office has been aware of them for years.

The plaintiffs’ experts who conducted inspections, reviewed records and interviewed people in custody identified what they described as alarming patterns, including delays in emergency care, improper medication management and a mental health system that fails to treat people in crisis.

“What’s fundamental in this case is that those mistakes are systematic — and they’re not addressed,” Swearingen told Battaglia.

The plaintiffs are also asking the judge to strike the testimony of six of the county’s expert witnesses, saying their methodology was flawed, among other problems. Battaglia asked only limited questions about two of those experts before focusing on Dr. Joseph Penn, the county’s expert on mental health care.

Plaintiffs say Penn reused portions of a report he wrote for a separate lawsuit involving Arizona prisons, including content that references nonexistent facilities and policies. They noted that in the Arizona case, a federal judge found Penn’s work to be “deeply flawed.”

Pappy defended Penn’s work, arguing that reusing material is common in legal and expert work, and that any concerns about credibility should be resolved during trial through cross-examination.

Battaglia acknowledged the concern but said he needed more context before deciding whether Penn’s recycled content rendered his testimony unreliable.

“I’m just trying to determine if the methodology, which failed in one court, is still relevant here,” he said.

Battaglia, who said he would issue a ruling “as soon as possible,” asked attorneys about how long they thought a potential trial would last. Lawyers for the plaintiffs said it could take two months; the defense said three.

“This is a case of magnitude to both sides,” he said. “There’s a lot of moving parts.”

Not mentioned at the hearing were the three declarations plaintiffs’ attorneys obtained last week from three men in the same unit as 42-year-old Corey Dean, the sixth person to die in a San Diego jail this year.

Dean, the men said, spent his final days banging on his cell door, crying for help. He smeared feces on his body and appeared to be in obvious distress but did not receive medical care.

Lead counsel Gay Grunfeld said the declarations will be used to support the Dunsmore plaintiffs’ demands for improved mental health care and an end to the overuse of isolation for people with psychiatric needs.

“We intend to use the declarations in support of our goals of reducing defendants’ reliance on administrative separation for mentally ill individuals and of requiring that safety checks result in actual mental health care — not just checking a box,” Grunfeld said.

Grunfeld sent an attorney to the jail to obtain the men’s statements. Jesse Gonzales, who contacted Grunfeld after Dean’s death, told The San Diego Union-Tribune that Dean seemed to be in a state of acute psychosis for days.

“He was banging on the walls,” Gonzales said. “He was saying he didn’t feel well.”

Dean flooded his cell with dirty toilet water and smeared feces across his face and body.

The men were housed in the jail’s administrative segregation unit, where Gonzales said nearly everyone — including himself — struggles with mental illness. Some men are allowed out of their cells for only an hour a day.

Access to mental health care, he said, was minimal.

Clinicians would pass by cells and ask if people were feeling suicidal, Gonzales said. If the answer was yes, the person would be placed in a stripped-down suicide cell. If they said no, they might not see a clinician again for weeks.

“There’s no actual counseling,” Gonzales said. “Just crossword puzzles and breathing techniques.”

He said the noise and stench in the unit could be overwhelming.

“All day, all night, someone is yelling,” he said. “There’s the smell of feces and urine. It’s hard.”

Gonzales said he spoke out about Dean’s death despite fears that deputies might retaliate against him.

“They try to make me stop advocating for myself,” Gonzales said. “But what’s right is right. What’s wrong is wrong. At least I can do one right thing in my life — to seek justice for Corey.”

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