California prison doctor receives $16.8 million award in whistleblower case

from Adam AshtonCalMatters

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A jury awarded $16.8 million to a California prison a doctor who claims her employer did not respond appropriately to a threat she received from an inmate, fired her when she raised concerns about her safety and then defamed her by allowing rumors to spread among staff.

The ruling, handed down last week, ends Dr. Beth Fischgrund’s six-year effort to challenge her dismissal from Salinas Valley State Prison, where she has worked as a contract psychologist since September 2017.

The jury’s decision “was one of the most surreal experiences of my life,” Fischgrund told CalMatters. “I felt like I finally got validation. It’s been six and a half years. I felt a lot of the time, ‘Am I going crazy?’ Was that my fault?’ And to hear each person step up and validate everything I felt was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.”

A spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation declined to comment on the case and did not say whether the state plans to appeal.

The case centered on a high-security prison yard in Monterey County. The unit housed inmates deemed unsafe to live with the general population due to the nature of their crimes, as well as some who had diagnoses of severe mental illness.

Fischgrund said he wants to work with this in prison because he has a passion for “the underserved population, the population that no one wants to work with.” She joined through a staffing agency the state uses because she has years of experience shortage of prison psychologists and is under a court order improving mental health care.

Fischgrund’s complaint, filed in Sacramento Superior Court, alleges that an inmate became too familiar with her, commenting on her appearance and calling her by an unprofessional nickname. The complaint said another doctor appeared to encourage this over-knowledge.

In July 2019, the inmate reportedly told another prison psychologist that he wanted to cut off Fischgrund’s head, prompting clinical staff to alert Fischgrund.

Doctors talked to Fischgrund about the threat before communicating with corrections staff who could have removed the inmate or taken steps to protect Fischgrund, according to the complaint.

That day, Fischgrund sent messages to the head of the prison’s mental health department, expressing concern for her safety and asking about staff protection procedures. She pressed senior doctors for help and answers over several days, the complaint said.

According to the complaint, the inmate spent a little more than a week in solitary confinement before returning to the yard where Fischgrund worked. He reportedly called her name from his cell, which shocked Fischgrund because she believed he would be separated from her.

Three days later, Fischgrund sent a message to Department of Corrections headquarters about her safety and staff protection policies. The inmate managed to approach her that day in the prison yard, the complaint states.

The complaint says she was told the corrections department determined the inmate’s threat was “not credible” and that he would not be removed from the yard where Fischgrund works. She was told she could leave this site.

She was fired two days after sending the message to headquarters, the complaint said.

Afterward, Fischgrund said she learned that no state prison would hire her as a contract psychologist. She also found that Salinas Valley State Prison had placed photos of her around the facility with her height, weight and date of birth, which were designed to keep her off the premises. She said the leaflets fueled rumors about her personal life.

“This is a catastrophic loss for the state of California because they simply failed to do anything to manage this risk,” said her attorney, Lawrence Bohm of the Bohm Law Group. “All Dr. Fischgrund did was try to help the state government deal better with these inmates, and instead of cheering, they fired her and trashed her reputation, causing extreme emotional harm that was recognized by the jury.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.