Inhumanity Has a Price

Yet, on her second incarceration, jail employees denied her insulin, ignored her cries for help, and failed to get her insulin when she became unconscious.

An electronic database (as was standard in most jails of Maricopa County's size by 2005) would surely have shown Braillard was diabetic and saved her life.

Consider that Harris County (Houston), Texas, operates a jail and sheriff's department of a similar size on a budget of $60 million less than Arpaio's. Harris County is no model jail, but officials there say they've had an electronic database of inmate health concerns for years. An electronic database for Maricopa County jails was finally started in July of this year — 18 months after Braillard died and eight years after auditors advised its installation.

The $6 million database was commissioned not by Arpaio but by healthcare officials, on the advice of a third-party consulting company recently hired by the county to "turn around" jail healthcare. The database should be finished by 2012 — 13 years after it was recommended and seven years after Braillard's death.

Even without the database and even with detention officers misdiagnosing her, Braillard should not have died. Fearing the ineptitude of Arpaio's jails, Braillard's friend, Deborah Fouts, faxed a note to the jail at 9:42 p.m. the night before Braillard went into diabetic coma. The note reminded Correctional Health Services, the jail's healthcare agency, that Braillard was diabetic and would die without insulin.

"Inmate Braillard, Booking # P037486 is diabetic and has not had insulin for two days," Fouts wrote in the fax, sent to the sheriff and the jail infirmary.

So what happened? An internal Sheriff's Office report after Braillard's death concluded that the faxed note "slipped through the cracks." And with a quick point of the finger to nobody in particular, Arpaio's detectives wrapped up the investigation.

Physicians and attorneys outside the jail say it's still common for prescriptions to slip through those same cracks that killed Braillard. They say inmates are being denied medication for diabetes, seizures, high blood pressure, asthma, thyroid conditions, and mental health disorders.

Braillard's was a costly slip-up indeed, not only for her, but for the county and its taxpayers. The county now faces a wrongful-death lawsuit brought by attorney Michael Manning, who has collected more than $18 million in settlements and judgments from wrongful deaths in Arpaio's jails.

Like the thousands of other lawsuits against Arpaio, it's impossible to predict the outcome of the suit by Braillard's family. Easier to calculate are the multimillion-dollar suits Arpaio already has lost from deaths that would have been prevented if Arpaio had only listened to expert warnings.

On March 29, 2006, a $9 million court judgment was leveled against Arpaio and the county in the beating and restraint-chair death of inmate Charles Agster III.

Agster, 33 and mentally retarded, was arrested for trespassing on August 6, 2001. Detention officers at the Madison Street Jail pulled a hood over his head and slammed him into a medieval-looking restraint chair. The hood around Agster's throat smothered him to the point that he became brain dead. He was pronounced legally dead three days later on August 9, 2001.

Agster's death should have been prevented. Two years before he was killed, the county had paid $8.25 million to settle the Norberg suffocation suit. Surveillance video shows officers wrestled Scott Norberg into a restraining chair, bound his mouth with a towel, and continued to beat and Taser him after he was handcuffed. Even after the multimillion-dollar payout to Norberg's family, Arpaio kept using the chairs — costing Agster his life and the county another $9 million.

But, really, the restraint chairs should have been discarded before that first payout. Three years before the Norberg settlement, in 1996, detention expert Eugene Miller warned Arpaio, "The best recommendation I can professionally make in respect to the Restraint Chair is to remove it from any use associated with the MCSO jail."

Then in 1997, Amnesty International protested the restraint chairs — an odd move considering that Amnesty usually focuses on prison conditions in Third World countries. The U.S. Department of Justice also took Arpaio to court twice over the chairs and other concerns.

In December 2005, Clint Yarbrough died as Norberg and Agster had died — bound and suffocated in a restraint chair. On April 18, 2007, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors approved a classified settlement in excess of $1 million to Yarbrough's family.

Norberg, Agster, and Yarbrough were never tried for the charges they were arrested on. They didn't live to see their first court dates.

These legally innocent Maricopa County residents died in Arpaio's jails because the sheriff refused to listen to expert advice.

They're not the only ones. Arpaio ignored warnings from experts about suicidal inmates, as well. Even before the sheriff was warned about understaffing, unorganized records, and restraint chairs, the Department of Justice warned him that his mental wards were unfit for suicidal inmates.

Arpaio's refusal to heed that Justice Department's warning led to at least four more preventable jail deaths.