On September 30, 2016, a prisoner at the Mahanoy State Correctional Institute filed this complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania. The plaintiff sued the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC), the Bureau of Health Care Services of the DOC, and members of the Health Bureau Hepatitis C Treatment Committee for injunctive relief under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. The plaintiff first sued these defendants in a separate case in 2015. For the full factual account, see Abu-Jamal v. Wetzel . Here, the plaintiff, represented by a criminal defense attorney and the Abolitionist Law Center, sought relief for violations of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. Specifically, he sought a preliminary and permanent injunction ordering the DOC to provide the plaintiff with anti-viral medication to treat his disease. Judge Robert D. Mariani was assigned to the case.

The defendants responded with a motion to dismiss on October 25, 2016. They argued that this case was “a subset” of the first case, so it should have been excluded under the first-filed rule. Second, the defendants argued the plaintiff could not prove Eighth Amendment “deliberate indifference” because other courts had already held monitoring and treatment sufficient.

The plaintiff filed a response brief on November 22, arguing that the rule against duplicative proceedings is narrow and intended to prevent litigation of the same claim in different courts. Here, the two suits arrived before the same court, involved only one common defendant, and addressed different legal issues. On the merits, the plaintiff argued the dispute was more than a “mere disagreement” on proper treatment. Rather, the defendants refused to cure the plaintiff’s hepatitis C for no reason other than the cost of treatment, and the president in other jurisdictions was distinguishable.

The parties agreed a new evidentiary hearing was unnecessary, and the court adopted the factual findings from the 2015 case. On January 3, 2017, the court granted the plaintiff’s motion for a preliminary injunction and denied the motion to dismiss, finding the first-filed rule inapplicable. The court found relief appropriate because the defendants chose, for non-medical reasons, to monitor rather than treat the plaintiff’s condition to the detriment of his health, meaning there was a reasonable likelihood of plaintiff’s success on the merits.

The defendants appealed this decision to the Third Circuit on January 12, 2017 (Appeal Docket No. 17-01156 consolidated with Appeal Docket No. 17-01125) and filed a motion to stay the preliminary injunction. On February 7, the plaintiff filed a motion to hold the defendants in contempt for failure to comply with the injunction. On March 27, the Third Circuit denied the defendant’s motion for a stay pending appeal of the injunction order. Pursuant to the defendant’s motion, the court then dismissed the appeal on April 14. 2017 WL 3160959.

Two days later, the plaintiff underwent sonogram and hepatic elastography testing that revealed his condition had deteriorated to grade 4 liver cirrhosis. As a result, on March 31, 2017, the defendants informed the court that the plaintiff would receive Hepatitis C medication. The defendants confirmed that the plaintiff would begin taking the antiviral drug Harvoni on April 6, and this would continue for twelve consecutive weeks. The court accepted this arrangement, and ordered on April 5 the defendants to file confirmation with the court once treatment began and to regularly communicate with the plaintiff’s counsel. The court held the remaining motions moot.

On May 4, 2017, the parties jointly moved to consolidate this case with the plaintiff’s first suit. The court granted this motion the same day, and the consolidated case has continued under the docket number of the first case. See Abu-Jamal v. Kerestes for an accounting of the subsequent events.

Erica Lignell - 07/10/2020


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