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The daughter of a former Indiana Department of Correction inmate failed to prove a doctor’s liability in the inmate’s death from Hepatitis C complications, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday in affirming a district court’s summary judgment order.
The circuit court ruled that the appellant, Skyler Tackett, presented insufficient evidence for a reasonable jury to find appellee Dr. Kristen Dauss liable for deliberate indifference in her individual capacity.
According to court records, Tackett is the personal representative of the estate of her father, Raymond Tackett, who suffered from Hepatitis C for years without receiving direct-acting antivirals, which could’ve cured the disease in a matter of weeks, according to the opinion.
He died in November 2019.
Raymond Tackett was an inmate with the Indiana Department of Corrections and had been diagnosed with Hepatitis C in 2008.
The viral infection used to be treated by a combination of often-ineffective drugs, but by the 2010s, treatment protocol had changed with the development of direct-acting antivirals.
According to the 7th Circuit, the department failed to consistently provide the antivirals to inmates with chronic Hepatitis C.
The department’s operative policy provided the antivirals to inmates with the most severe cases, but in practice, few inmates received the treatment.
In October 2019, a settlement of a class action lawsuit reached in the U.S. District Court in Southern Indiana required the department to provide the antivirals to inmates with Hepatitis C based on standards of severity.
Tackett began seeking treatment for the disease in May 2018 and did so until his death but was often tested and told his disease was not severe enough to receive the treatment. IDOC continued to operate under a policy that prioritized treatment based on severity, and did not provide treatment to all Hepatitis C-positive inmates.
Dauss became the department’s chief medical officer in March 2019, just days after the department implemented a policy that continued to treat Hepatitis C patients based on severity.
That April, Dauss created a “working policy” that “provided additional clarity” as to how regional providers should distribute the treatment, according to the opinion.
In July 2019, a doctor requested that Tackett be considered for treatment, but nothing came of the request. Tackett submitted another request that month, but never received treatment.
While Skyler Tackett settled with numerous other defendants, she continued to pursue her Eighth Amendment deliberate indifference claim against Dauss in her individual capacity.
At the district court level, the court determined Dauss took “reasonable steps to expand access to DAAs to treat all prisoners with HCV” and was “not responsible for the medical providers’ treatment decisions” that resulted in Tackett’s death.
Writing for the circuit court, Judge James Sweeney stated that Tackett only showed that Dauss maintained a policy that prioritized treatment for the sickest patients, of which her father was one, but did not show any other action by the doctor that impacted his care.
The record did not show that Dauss was aware Tackett was not getting treatment, Sweeney wrote.
In conclusion, the circuit court stated that while Dauss “may have acted negligently or even committed malpractice” by not implementing a policy that would’ve treated Tackett, there is no evidence that she committed a constitutional violation.
“We regret Ms. Tackett’s loss,” Sweeney wrote. “Her father’s death was preventable and senseless. We hope that the IDOC will honor its commitment under Stafford to provide all HCV-positive individuals with DAAs so that this kind of tragedy will not happen again.”
The case is Skyler Tackett v. Kristen Dauss, No. 23-2246.
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