New York City has paid more than $5 million over the past few weeks to settle two suits alleging the city is responsible for the deaths of two men who overdosed on methadone while incarcerated on Rikers Island. Attorneys on the cases hope the financial penalty will push the city to implement policies to prevent future overdose deaths and take more serious steps toward closing the prison.
The suits allege that both Jose Mejia Martinez, 34, who died in 2021, and Donny Ruben Ubiera, 33, who died in 2023, had been diagnosed with serious mental health conditions and died due to a lack of proper response from correction officers leading up to, during and after their respective overdoses. Both obtained meth from other incarcerated individuals and took it in common areas where officers were supposed to be present.
“Maintaining Rikers in its current condition is not smart, not only from a human perspective of how people are treated, but also from a taxpayer perspective,” said attorney Katie Rosenfeld, who represented the families of both men who died while incarcerated. “The city is spending millions of dollars to settle cases because people are constantly being subject to mistreatment and dying in our jail. That should, hopefully, be support for the reform of Rikers Island and for closing it.”
Their respective overdoses and deaths illustrate severe policy failures, Rosenfeld said.
Martinez had only been incarcerated for a few weeks for a nonviolent parole violation when he overdosed on meth and showed “signs of medical distress,” staggering and struggling to stand in front of a correction officer who walked right past him without helping. He returned to his cell with help from other incarcerated individuals, where officers looked in at him multiple times while he lay incapacitated but did not call for help or attempt to administer first aid or Narcan.
A medical emergency was only declared after another incarcerated person told staff he was unresponsive. Medical staff arrived at his cell after he was already dead.
Ubiera overdosed just weeks after he was transferred back to Rikers after being treated at a psychiatric center for schizophrenia. Officers did not provide him with the consistent mental health treatment or supervision he was prescribed, nor did they step in when he showed signs of deteriorating mental health, including attempting to choke himself with a sheet and saying he wanted to kill himself in front of correction officers.
He took meth in front of officers, then returned to his cell, where he banged on the door and called for help all night. No one responded, a correction officer who was supposed to conduct rounds didn’t and, when, he was discovered unresponsive the next morning, officers had to retrieve Narcan from a different housing unit because it wasn’t in his unit, another policy violation. He was pronounced dead after attempts to revive him were unsuccessful.
“It’s worth noting that these two deaths unfortunately happened two years apart,” Rosenfeld said, saying that showed the correctional facility was persistently not ready to respond to medical crises relating to substance use and mental illnesses.
She said those problems persisted, not because individual correctional officers don’t care or “are bad people,” but because of dysfunction throughout the jail system that creates a toxic environment for incarcerated people and for staff who work there.
“The conditions that people are being jailed in and the conditions that people are working in are equally bad,” Rosenfeld said. “I think the dysfunction of working in that place, unfortunately, leads people to become indifferent to the humanity of the people there. It’s not a normal thing where you would have somebody watch somebody in obvious medical distress and ignore it.”
“This is about a system of keeping people in a huge jail that should have been closed long ago, under really stressful conditions, without substance abuse treatment,” she continued. “It leads to people treating each other in terrible ways that they wouldn’t if they were not in this environment.”
City Hall did not respond to a request for comment on whether it would look to make changes at Rikers in the wake of the settlements. The Department of Correction directed amNewYork Law to the city’s Law Department, which declined to comment.
While these specific settlements are unlikely to create the change she thinks is necessary by themselves, Rosenfeld said, together with the information obtained in investigations carried out by state Attorney General Letitia James after their deaths, she thinks the public awareness and political pressure on the city created by the suits and settlements is a critical piece of the work.
“These settlements alone are not going to change how the city operates,” Rosenfeld said. “But, if there are not challenges when people die and there’s just simply silence, the city has no impetus to change. So, even if it’s one piece of the puzzle, I think lawsuits are an important way to bring pressure on the city and to bring public awareness to how bad the conditions are.”
At the very least, she said, these suits and settlements ensure deaths on Rikers aren’t allowed to happen in the dark without any accountability or public awareness.
“I think it can become very anonymized and sort of abstract, because there’s so many deaths on Rikers Island,” Rosenfeld said. “This is an acknowledgment from the city that this person died as a result of their mistakes and misconduct and that their life had value. That’s very meaningful to people, because otherwise it just feels like people lose their lives in Rikers Island and then nothing happens, and there’s no accountability.”