ProPublica: Justice

Buffalo Jail With a Grim History Agrees to Suicide-Prevention Steps

2010-06-22T11:04:28-05:00

The U.S. Justice Department has settled a long-running dispute with a jail in Buffalo, N.Y., over whether the facility's failure to prevent inmate suicides violated federal civil rights law.

Under the agreement announced Friday, administrators of the Erie County Holding Center admitted no constitutional violations, but pledged to implement a host of reforms and physical improvements under the oversight of a court monitor. The agreement will become final if a federal judge approves it.

Justice Department officials and the Erie County Sheriff’s Office did not return calls from ProPublica about the settlement. U. S. Attorney William J. Hochul Jr. told The Buffalo News that the agreement represented a major step forward. “There is just a whole host of things that the county has committed to begin doing as soon as the judge signs the agreement,” Hochul said.

The settlement follows a two-year standoff in which the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division demanded that Erie County improve jail conditions and county officials insisted they were meeting federal and state safety standards.

Detainees at the 680-bed jail kill themselves at a rate five times the national average. There have been eight suicides there since 2005, including three after the Justice Department filed a lawsuit last September accusing jail overseers of not doing enough to prevent inmates from harming themselves.

Earlier this year, we wrote about how smaller jails like the Erie County Holding Center have struggled to meet minimum standards established by federal law, while larger facilities have made substantial strides in lowering inmate suicide rates.

Under the agreement, Erie County officials will improve suicide screening and assessment, provide training in suicide prevention and detoxification to jail staffers, and improve medical record-keeping. They also have promised to make physical upgrades to prevent inmates from hanging themselves, such as installing Plexiglas over cell bars and replacing certain types of air conditioner vents.

The settlement does not cover all claims made in the Justice Department lawsuit. The government and the county are still on course to litigate allegations that the jail provides inadequate health care and that guards have used excessive force and engaged in sexual misconduct.

Gitmo Judge Recuses Self After Complaint Based on ProPublica Interview

2010-06-17T15:28:32-05:00

Chisun Lee

A federal judge recused himself yesterday from a case challenging the detention of a Guantanamo prisoner after the detainee’s lawyer complained that views he expressed in a ProPublica interview meant he couldn’t be fair.

In a January article exploring the court’s role in policing indefinite detention, Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., said judges were struggling with how to assess the risks posed by detainees. Referring to no detainee in particular, he said, "How confident can I be that if I make the wrong choice that he won’t be the one that blows up the Washington Monument or the Capitol?"

Lawyer H. Candace Gorman of Chicago promptly filed a motion demanding that the judge withdraw from the case of her client, Abdal Razik Ali. Lamberth’s comment, Gorman argued, suggested that his personal fears – apart from the facts of the case – could drive him to deny her client’s request for release.

Justice Department lawyer Nancy Safavi countered in a response brief that Lamberth’s comments to ProPublica were too general to indicate bias against Razik Ali.

In his recusal order Lamberth dismissed Gorman’s complaints as "much ado about nothing," but decided nonetheless to withdraw.

Razik Ali, an Algerian captured by Pakistani authorities in 2002 and then transferred to U.S. custody, is one of 181 men who are still being held at Guantanamo as suspected al-Qaida or Taliban militants. Nearly all have filed federal lawsuits, known as a habeas petitions, contesting the government’s evidence or legal rationale for holding them. In April we reported that the government had lost 34 of the 47 habeas cases decided up to that point. Of the three cases decided since, the government has lost two.

Razik Ali’s case was randomly reassigned to Judge Richard Leon, who has ruled in favor of six detainees and against five. "I think he’ll be fair," Gorman said.

Colleague Says Anthrax Numbers Add Up to Unsolved Case

2010-04-23T11:45:53-05:00

by Gary Matsumoto, Special to ProPublica -

A microbiologist who supervised the work of accused anthrax killer Bruce E. Ivins explained to a National Academy of Sciences panel Thursday why the arithmetic of growing anthrax didn't add up to Ivins' mailing deadly spores in fall 2001.

"Impossible," said Dr. Henry S. Heine of a scenario in which Ivins, another civilian microbiologist working for the Army, allegedly prepared the anthrax spores at an Army lab at Fort Detrick. Heine told the 16-member panel that Ivins would have had to grow as many as 10 trillion spores, an astronomical amount that couldn't have gone unnoticed by his colleagues.

According to FBI calculations, Ivins accomplished this working after-hours in a special suite for handling lethal agents designated B3, for Biohazard Level 3. A bar chart released by the bureau (PDF) when it closed its nearly 9-year-old Amerithrax case in February showed that in August and September 2001, the months immediately before the first anthrax letters were mailed, Ivins logged 34 more hours in the B3 suite than his combined total for the previous seven months.

"That's more than 8,000 hours (close to a year) short of what he would have needed to grow the anthrax," Heine told ProPublica in an interview after his NAS presentation.

Heine, one of the few scientists at the Army lab with the skills to grow large batches of anthrax, told ProPublica it would have taken around "100 liters of liquid anthrax culture," or more than 26 gallons, to grow all the dried spores that killed five Americans and infected 17 others.

"He couldn't have done that without us knowing it," said Heine.

Other biodefense scientists who didn't work with Ivins have done the same calculations and reached the same conclusion as Heine.

The FBI declined to comment on this latest challenge to its decision to end one of the most expensive manhunts in the bureau's 102-year history. In closing the case, the agency said Ivins alone was responsible for the anthrax letters. Ivins committed suicide in 2008.

Many of Ivins' colleagues and some federal lawmakers protested that the FBI was premature in closing the books on Ivins before the academy had completed its review of the science undergirding the bureau's case. "To this day, it is still far from clear that Mr. Ivins had either the know-how or access to the equipment needed to produce the material," said Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., in written remarks published in March.

The day Heine and his Fort Detrick colleagues learned of Ivins' suicide in July 2008, Heine said they conferred and feared the F.B.I. would then blame the attacks on someone who could no longer speak in his own defense. "And the very next day, the bureau named Bruce the mailer," Heine recalled.

Because of an FBI gag order, Heine said he was unable to discuss these details until he left his job at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, at Fort Detrick, where Ivins also worked developing anthrax vaccines. Heine left in February and is now senior scientist at the Ordway Research Institute, Inc. Center for Biodefense and Emerging Infections in Albany, N.Y.

Heine said his expertise in growing anthrax made him a suspect like Ivins. He said FBI agents gave him a polygraph exam and took statements from him several times between 2001 and 2003. The FBI was never far away, he said. A former scoutmaster, Heine said that on campouts his Boy Scout troop used to keep a "black Suburban watch," looking for the vehicles driven by the agents keeping Heine under surveillance.

"The FBI went after our weakest link," Heine said, referring to Ivins and other scientists at Fort Detrick, in Maryland. He called Ivins "fragile" and especially vulnerable to bureau attempts to extract a confession from him.

"If Bruce did it, we would've turned him in for a million dollars in a heartbeat," said Heine, referring to the government reward for information leading to the capture of the anthrax mailer. "Seriously, though, reward or no reward, we would've stopped him because that would've been the right thing to do."

The FBI linked Ivins to the crime, in part, because of a genetic match between the anthrax spores kept by Ivins and those in the letters. Documents released by the bureau said that samples of the same anthrax strain were shipped by Ivins to at least four different U.S. laboratories before the attacks.

That doesn't exonerate Ivins, Heine conceded, but he said Ivins' guilt is also far from certain. The spores in the anthrax letters were in a dry powder form that spread easily.

"When you dry spores, they fly everywhere and you can't see 'em," said Heine. "Had Bruce made it during all those late nights in the hot suite, we would've been his first victims."

As Gitmo Detainees’ Legal Victories Mount, Obama Administration Resists Orders to Release

2010-04-21T09:57:08-05:00

Chisun Lee

The government is failing in more and more cases to produce evidence that the men it has imprisoned at Guantanamo belong there, according to ProPublica's latest look at the lawsuits that some 100 captives have filed in federal court to seek their freedom. But the Obama administration continues to challenge the courts' authority to make it release the prisoners.

In 34 out of the 47 cases that have been decided so far -- over 70 percent -- detainees have won judgments that the United States is subjecting them to indefinite detention as al-Qaida or Taliban enemies without proof, and that they must be released. Federal judges have been reviewing classified intelligence and interrogation reports since June 2008, when the Supreme Court recognized the detainees' right to sue. The remaining prisoners have been held seven years or longer.

Even with the sensitive information blacked out, the judges' opinions offer reams of detail about what the detainees were doing when they were captured, how the U.S. took custody of and interrogated them, and why the courts have rejected specific pieces of evidence as unreliable or even completely unbelievable in the vast majority of the cases. These opinions are summarized and also available in full in ProPublica's updated database.

In ordinary criminal cases, a court order of release because of unjustified detention results in ... release. But in the terrorism detention cases, it promises no more than the "possibility" of release, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week. Asked if the executive branch could take 10 years to release a detainee against whom there is no good evidence, he said only, "You would hope not."

The administration is expected to elaborate on its position that the courts can't make it release unlawfully imprisoned captives at an appeals court argument this Thursday. The dispute holds implications beyond Guantanamo, because at its core it questions the meaning of the constitutional doctrine of habeas corpus -- a fundamental American guarantee against unjust imprisonment -- in the potentially expanding context of terrorism detention.

Despite denying its duty to do so in court, the administration has quietly been releasing many of the detainees who've won their lawsuits, known as habeas petitions. Twenty of the men have been transferred to other countries, while 14 remain at Guantanamo as the government appeals the judges' decisions.

Top Washington Lawyer, Holder Friend to Be Next Deputy Attorney General

2010-04-19T16:57:15-05:00

Dafna Linzer

The Obama administration is preparing to announce the nomination of James M. Cole to serve as deputy attorney general, according to two individuals with first-hand knowledge of the appointment.

Cole, a partner at Bryan Cave, is a top white-collar criminal defense attorney in Washington, D.C., and former federal prosecutor who served as deputy of the Justice Department's Public Integrity Division during the Clinton administration. He is also a long-time friend and former colleague of Attorney General Eric Holder.

Cole did not immediately return a phone or e-mail message for comment. Ben LaBolt, a White House spokesman, said: "No decision has been made at this stage." One current Justice Department official and a second former official said Holder and the White House had settled on Cole's nomination in recent days. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the nomination is still confidential and the White House is only now completing the vetting process.

Holder's previous deputy, David Ogden, left the department in February after serving less than a year. Ogden led Obama's transition team for the Justice Department, but officials said he and Holder did not work well together and that Ogden agreed last fall to step down.

In addition to his years in government, Cole, 57, has had a number of high-profile clients, including Edwin Edwards, the former Democratic governor of Louisiana. He has also served as an independent monitor at AIG. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that Cole and his firm were paid more than $20 million by AIG as part of negotiated settlements reached in 2004 and 2006 between the insurance giant, the Justice Department, the SEC and former New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.

Although Cole's oversight role continued into 2009, he did not oversee the credit default swap contracts that led to AIG's near collapse in September 2008.

Cole may be best known in Washington for a yearlong investigation into former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1996, when Cole was special counsel to the House ethics committee. Cole's report found that Gingrich had misused tax exempt funds and provided false information to the committee inquiry. The findings led to a stinging rebuke of Gingrich, with House lawmakers voting 395-28 to reprimand the speaker and fine him $300,000.

The No. 2 at the Justice Department manages daily operations. Ogden returned to Wilmer Hale, where he is a partner. Since his departure, the job has been filled on an acting basis by Assistant Attorney General Gary Grindler.

The Washington Post reported in February that Dan Marcus, a law professor from American University, was being considered for the job along with Grindler and two other Justice Department officials.

Add-on to Health Care Bill Gives Feds More Power to Investigate Jail Conditions

2010-04-15T12:54:25-05:00

Mosi Secret

Among the many lesser-known provisions tucked into the lengthy health care reform bill passed last month is one that expands the U.S. attorney general's power to look into the abuse and neglect of those living in institutional settings.

The provision, first reported by the Web site Main Justice, amends the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA) to allow the Justice Department to issue subpoenas compelling publicly run prisons, jails, mental health facilities and nursing homes to open their doors to inspectors and turn over records.

Most local and state officials cooperate with CRIPA probes, resolving disputes through settlement agreements. Occasionally, however, they refuse to participate in the process, forcing the federal government to take them to court.

We wrote about one such case in Buffalo, N.Y., where Erie County Sheriff Timothy Howard balked at Justice Department requests for unfettered access to the Erie County Holding Center. The Justice Department opened an investigation into conditions at the 680-bed jail in November 2007 in response to reports of excessive force by guards and a rash of inmate suicides. When Erie County officials would not make improvements voluntarily, the Justice Department filed suit. Its inspectors gained access to the jail last month under a court order, prompted, at least in part, by three additional inmate suicides that have occurred since oral arguments began in the case.

The CRIPA language was originally a part of the Health Care Fraud Enforcement Act, which Sen. Ted Kaufman, D-Del., introduced last October. That bill never made it out of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Last November, Kaufman introduced an amendment to the Senate version of the health care reform bill that included many of his original provisions. The CRIPA language remained in the bill that President Barack Obama signed.

"The absence of subpoena authority enables non-cooperating jurisdictions to obstruct and delay the [Civil Rights] Division in its mission to ensure that the federal rights of persons in the custody of state and local officials are respected," a spokesperson for Kaufman wrote in an e-mail. "The resultant litigation when jurisdictions exploit the absence of subpoena power is extraordinarily costly, yet the substantive outcome ... is the same."

It is not yet clear when the Justice Department can begin issuing subpoenas. Justice Department officials declined to comment.

New Clues Emerge in Post-Katrina Vigilante Shooting at Algiers Point

2010-04-12T05:11:25-05:00

by A.C. Thompson, ProPublica, and Brendan McCarthy, Times-Picayune -

Three days after Hurricane Katrina turned New Orleans into a ghost town, somebody shot Donnell Herrington twice in Algiers Point, ripping a hole in his throat.

Herrington, who is African-American, says he was ambushed by a group of armed white men who attacked without warning or provocation. He barely survived the shooting, which shredded his internal jugular vein, a key vessel that transports blood from the brain to the heart. He believes the assault was racially motivated.

No one has ever been charged in the incident, but now, more than four years later, at least two figures have come forward with information implicating a neighborhood man in the attack. These two people linked Roland Bourgeois Jr. to the shooting in interviews with ProPublica, the Times-Picayune and PBS’ “Frontline.”

Terri Benjamin, who lived in the area, said she saw Bourgeois, 47, pledge to shoot anybody with skin “darker than a brown paper bag” while clutching a shotgun. At one point, she said, he held up the blood-drenched baseball cap of a man who’d just been shot.

Bourgeois’ mother, Pam Pitre, said her son did fire his shotgun at an African-American man that day in Algiers Point, and acknowledged that he kept the man’s hat. Pitre, who insists her son “is not a racist,” said Bourgeois was accompanied by another man who also fired shots.

Herrington, whose story closely tracks with the accounts of Pitre and Benjamin, lost his navy blue baseball cap when he was shot. After viewing a photo of Bourgeois, Herrington identified the man as one of his attackers. Bourgeois, he said, “definitely was one of the guys I saw that day. … I definitely remember him. He was one of 'em.”

Bourgeois, who has not been charged with any crime, declined to be interviewed.

The Herrington shooting is the subject of an ongoing probe by U.S. Department of Justice attorneys and FBI agents, who are examining claims that white residents of Algiers Point attacked African-Americans in a spate of racially motivated violence in the days after Katrina tore through Louisiana. Over the past several months, federal prosecutors have questioned numerous witnesses about the alleged hate crimes in grand jury proceedings.

At the U.S. Department of Justice, spokesperson Xochitl Hinojosa said she couldn’t comment on the investigation.

So far, the hate crimes probe has been overshadowed by a sprawling federal investigation of the New Orleans Police Department, an effort that’s snared guilty pleas from three former officers for crimes committed in the aftermath of the storm. But the accounts of what transpired in Algiers Point may soon force the city to revisit another painful episode from those grim days.

‘I thought it was over’

The floodwaters that spilled over much of New Orleans didn’t touch Algiers Point.

Still, the catastrophe prompted the neighborhood’s residents – most of whom are white -- to take action. Within days, a band of 15 to 30 locals had taken up weapons, barricaded the streets with downed trees and debris, and begun regular patrols of the area. Residents say they were trying to keep their homes from being overrun by thieves and outlaws.

“There’s no black and white issue here,” said Clyde Price III, a white man who lived next door to Bourgeois for many years.

But others, including Malik Rahim, the co-founder of the activist group Common Ground Relief, who was in Algiers Point in the days after the storm, believe the neighborhood militia carried out a series of hate crimes, threatening and shooting black people who walked into the area.

Herrington said that the attack on him occurred on Sept. 1, 2005, as he strode toward the Algiers Point ferry terminal with his cousin, Marcel Alexander, and a friend, Chris Collins.

As part of a rescue mission called Operation Dunkirk, the U.S. Coast Guard had created a makeshift evacuation center at the terminal. Using an array of watercraft, sailors transported thousands of flood victims from St. Bernard Parish and East Bank neighborhoods to the ferry terminal; from there, they were bused out of town.

Herrington, 33, and his companions say they were aiming to get on one of those buses.

But as the trio approached the intersection of Pelican Avenue and Vallette Street, a white man pointed a shotgun at Herrington and, without saying a word, squeezed the trigger, according to Herrington. “I thought I was about to die,” he said. “I thought it was over.”

The first shotgun blast ripped into his throat, torso and arms. Somehow, Herrington got to his feet and began running. He remembers two more armed men joining the first gunman. As he tried to escape, he says, a second blast struck him in the back.

Both Alexander and Collins witnessed the shooting -- and both also suffered minor gunshot wounds. “I thought Donnell was dead,” recalled Alexander, who backs up his cousin’s account. “I thought that I would never see Donnell no more.”

Alexander, who was 17, said he and Collins were briefly taken prisoner by a group of about five armed white men, one of whom threatened to set them on fire. Eventually, though, the men let Alexander and Collins go.

Bleeding, Herrington staggered to the home of an African-American couple who drove him to West Jefferson Medical Center, where doctors discovered buckshot in his arms, chest, abdomen and back, X-ray reports show. A cluster of pellets had torn open the internal jugular vein along the right side of his throat, according to medical records and one of Herrington’s surgeons, Dr. Charles Thomas. At 3:43 p.m., he underwent surgery to repair the shredded vein.

Herrington is adamant that he and his companions did nothing to provoke the incidents. “We were just in the neighborhood for a few minutes,” he said. “We were just passing through.” The only way to the ferry terminal from his home, he noted, was through Algiers Point.

Over the course of several interviews, Herrington remembered one last detail about his ordeal: He’d been wearing a navy blue baseball cap bearing the logo of either the New York Yankees or the Detroit Tigers. During the scramble, he said, the hat must have fallen off his head.

‘Big-game hunting’

As Terri Benjamin and her aunt, Eudith Rodney, walked along Pelican Avenue that day, the reverberating boom of gunfire echoed through the thick, humid air.

Fearful, the women began running toward the safety of Benjamin’s home. As they neared Vallette Street, they encountered a group of armed white men, Benjamin said in an interview.

Among the men, Benjamin recalled, was Roland Bourgeois Jr., who lived just two doors down on Vallette Street. Bourgeois was gripping a shotgun and celebrating.

“My neighbor was jumping up and down, hootin’ and hollerin’ like he was big-game hunting and he got the big one,” she said. “All of his friends were rallying him on, and they were cheering.”

A beefy character with a shaved head, Bourgeois screamed “I got one!” and boasted that he’d shot a “looter,” said Benjamin, who shared her story with a federal grand jury on March 25.

Before long, she said, another armed man -- someone Benjamin didn’t recognize -- showed up with news: The person Bourgeois had shot was wounded but alive a few blocks away.

According to Benjamin, Bourgeois said, “I’m gonna kill that nigger,” and ran, barefoot and shirtless, down the street before turning and jogging out of view.

Benjamin heard another gunshot.

Bourgeois ran back to join the group of gun-equipped men standing in the street, she said. “He came back with a baseball cap that had blood on it. And I knew there was blood on the cap because it ran onto his arm. And he brandished the cap for all of his friends,” Benjamin said. “Everybody cheered. They were happy for him.”

Benjamin, who is ethnically mixed -- white, Latino and African-American -- was waiting for an uncle and cousin, both of whom are African-American, to come to her house. She feared Bourgeois and the other men would attack her relatives.

“I went to him and asked him to spare their lives,” Benjamin remembered. “He said, ‘Darlin’, anything coming up that street darker than a brown paper bag is gettin’ shot.’"

Traumatized, Benjamin moved out of the state after Katrina, but just weeks ago, she made two trips to the neighborhood, accompanied by a federal prosecutor and an FBI agent who asked her to retrace her steps.

The investigators, she said, were interested in Bourgeois. “They asked me specifically about him,” Benjamin said. Assistant U.S. Attorney Forrest Christian also questioned her about a “sidekick” of Bourgeois, she said.

‘Like gang members’

Bourgeois may be guilty of poor judgment, but he didn’t commit a hate crime, according to his mother, Pam Pitre.

In a recent interview, she explained her understanding of the shooting her son participated in. Pitre said she’s discussed the shooting in detail with Bourgeois, and testified before the grand jury about it.

In Pitre’s telling, Bourgeois encountered three dangerous and “arrogant” African-American males who’d been trying to break into parked cars, Pitre said. “He said they looked like gang members to him,” she recalled.

After the trio of black men tried to move one of the barricades blocking the street, Bourgeois and another man began shooting at them, said Pitre. “Both men had guns. Both fired,” she said, adding that she didn’t know the name of the other shooter.

According to Pitre, the shots were meant to “scare,” not to kill.

When the gunfire stopped, Bourgeois “picked up the baseball cap” that had fallen from the head of one of the shooting victims, according Pitre, who said her son kept the hat until she convinced him to get rid of it.

Pitre says the shooting had nothing to do with skin color. “If they want to say it was a bad decision — yes, it was. But it wasn’t a hate crime,” she said. “He is not a racist — and that’s what bothers me more than anything else.”

Bourgeois was terrified by the lawlessness that followed the storm and flooding, she said. He was threatened by a group of African-Americans, she said, and “pelted with bottles” in the days before the shooting occurred.

The only reason the matter came to the attention of federal authorities, Pitre maintained, is that “this man Roland shot survived and is telling his tale.”

Bourgeois’ family has owned property in Algiers Point for decades, and around the neighborhood he’s known as a dog lover. Aside from a 1992 arrest for possession of marijuana, he has no criminal record in Orleans Parish.

Civil court records show Bourgeois has at least two children. He is now residing with his mother in Mississippi.

Price, his former neighbor, said Bourgeois has been unfairly tarred as a racist. “Everyone paints a bad picture of him because he’s a big, white bald dude and a gun fanatic,” said Price. “They think it was all racism. But it wasn’t.”

Still, Price acknowledged, Bourgeois has a habit of referring to African-Americans as “niggers.”

‘A racial statement’

Over the past year, FBI agents have interviewed Herrington numerous times and have canvassed the neighborhood, going door-to-door in an effort to locate witnesses to the shooting. One local who was questioned by agents said they were seeking information about approximately 30 Algiers Point residents.

At this point, however, it’s unclear whether the probe will lead to criminal indictments.

Herrington continues to feel anger about what happened to him.

“To me, it was a hate crime,” he said. “It was a racial statement.” He thinks if his skin was a different hue — if he’d been a “white guy” striding through the neighborhood, en route to the ferry terminal — “it wouldn’t have happened to me.”

Editor's note: The Roland Bourgeois Jr. in this story should not be confused with the Metairie, La., physician of the same name.

FRONTLINE Producer Oriana Zill de Granados contributed to this report.

FRONTLINE Video: Terri Benjamin

2010-04-11T23:39:31-05:00

by ProPublica

FRONTLINE Video: Terri Benjamin

Return to main story.

FRONTLINE Video: Donnell Herrington

2010-04-11T23:33:38-05:00

by ProPublica

FRONTLINE Video: Donnell Herrington

Return to main story.

Small County Jail in Upstate New York Has Big Problem With Suicides

2010-03-29T09:33:09-05:00

Mosi Secret

At the 680-bed Erie County Holding Facility, a small jail on the shores of Lake Erie in Buffalo, N.Y., six inmates have committed suicide in the past five years, as many as at Rikers Island, the sprawling New York City jail that typically houses about 14,000 inmates.

In 2007, an Erie inmate killed himself by diving off a 15-foot railing in full view of sheriff's deputies. That same year, an inmate took his life after officials removed him from 24-hour suicide watch and put him with the other inmates. In 2008, two detainees used bed sheets to hang themselves from air vents, raising to 15 the number of inmates who had committed suicide this way, or tried to, since 2002.

County jails, most of them originally designed to hold low-level offenders, now serve, to some degree, as de facto psychiatric wards. Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca famously referred to the jails he oversees as “the largest mental health institution in the country.”

While large jail systems have made substantial inroads in safeguarding mentally ill inmates, sharply reducing suicide rates since the early 1980s, some smaller jails -- hobbled by poor layouts, thin staffing and inadequate training -- are struggling to meet the most basic requirements set by federal law.

Their shortcomings can take a deadly toll. Suicides account for more than two of five deaths at smaller jails, versus fewer than one of five in the country's 50 largest jails, Bureau of Justice Statistics show. Despite improvements in prevention techniques, inmates at smaller jails remain twice as likely as those at larger jails to die by their own hand. Detainees at the Erie facility kill themselves at a rate five times the national average.

“It is difficult for these small jails when they are competing with resources that go to free society,” said Christine Tartaro, an associate professor of criminal justice at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey and co-author of the 2009 book “Suicide and Self-Harm in Prisons and Jails.”

The Justice Department’s civil rights division issued findings on six jails nationwide last year for providing substandard mental health care. Four were smaller jails, housing 1,500 inmates or fewer, the Erie County Holding Facility among them.

The Justice Department began its investigation into problems at the Erie County jail in 2007, but local officials denied its experts unfettered access to the facility and failed to make improvements voluntarily, court records show. Stymied, the department sued the county last September, alleging it had an “inability to supervise inmates, identify inmates at risk for suicide, correct deficiencies in cells that facilitate suicide attempts, and prevent likely suicide attempts.”

Erie County officials did not return phone calls from ProPublica about the case. County Attorney Cheryl Green has asserted in court documents that the jail meets constitutional requirements and that inmates cannot expect “the amenities, conveniences and services of a good hotel.”

A federal judge recently ordered the county to allow Justice Department experts into the jail, partly because three inmates have committed suicide there since oral arguments began in the case in December. Officials from the agency toured the facility last week.

Unlike prisons, which house offenders who have been sentenced, jails hold mostly pretrial detainees – people who have not yet been convicted.

New inmates may be detoxing from alcohol or street drugs. They often arrive without medical records and whatever prescription medications they are taking. Some may be upset following confrontations with police. Things can turn bad in a hurry: A census of jail suicides between 2000 and 2002 found almost a quarter of the deaths happened within 48 hours of admission, and nearly half occurred in the first week of custody.

A proper intake screening is critical, experts say. “You can pick up the signs and when there is a problem, you do a mental health study and then you take the precautions that are necessary,” said Fred Cohen, an Arizona attorney who is an expert in correctional law and a federal court monitor for Ohio’s juvenile detention centers. “Most of the signs and symptoms of the likelihood of suicide are either ignored or the guys don’t know.”

In Erie County, a 2008 report by the National Commission on Correctional Health Care found that the intake screenings were inadequate and that there was no documentation proving that the correctional officers performing them had been trained. They collected medical information, but often failed to record it properly: “The receiving screening information is not filed in the health record in almost 40 percent of the patient records reviewed,” the commission reported.

Some smaller jails, especially older ones, lack the design features and equipment to monitor inmates identified as having suicidal tendencies. At more modern jails, that means glass-walled cells allowing for continuous observation, and Velcro smocks and tear-proof blankets that can’t be torn up and turned into nooses.

Cells at the Erie County facility, by contrast, provided inmates with “multiple ways to facilitate committing suicide,” according to the national commission’s assessment. The jail’s old-fashioned steel beds, window bars, grab bars and removable wall plates could be used by inmates to harm themselves.

Experts say smaller jails often have too little staff to provide inmates with adequate care – a situation likely to worsen as state and local governments deal with shrinking budgets.

In 2003, Erie County eliminated several health care positions at the jail, including the head nurse and almost half of the mental health staff. The next year, the holding center began admitting inmates who had been held in the Buffalo Police Department’s lockup, further straining the staff.

“Medical staff report that they are not always able to take vital signs, feel rushed and experience burnout,” the national commission’s report found. “The facility does not have a chronic care program; treatment plans are not developed even for inmates with serious mental illness; and progress notes are often not entered in the medical record.”

In Erie County and elsewhere, those monitoring jail inmates are typically sheriff’s deputies with limited training in recognizing the signs of mental illness – most of their training prepares them to be street cops.

“The sheriff’s office has two very different sets of responsibilities,” says David Fathi, director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project, who has litigated several constitutional claims against jails and prisons. “One is to be law enforcement patrol officers to the free world and one is to be correctional officers. … Often there is a preference among the deputies for patrol duty. To the extent that correctional work is thought of as a less desirable job function, it often gets short shrift in terms of training and resources. … My anecdotal experience it that seems to be more often a problem in smaller jails.”

The Erie County sheriff’s deputies who work in the jail get just eight hours of training in suicide prevention screening, court documents show.

With six suicides since 2005 and many more attempts, the Erie County jail may yet emerge as a battleground for determining the minimum quality of care to which jail inmates are entitled.

It is facing heightened scrutiny from state regulators as well as the Justice Department. Earlier this month, the chairman of the New York State Commission of Correction, Thomas Beilein, ordered a comprehensive review of the facility’s suicide screening program and sent two investigators to inspect the jail. Erie County Sheriff Timothy Howard cooperated with that inspection.

Howard and other Erie officials continue to battle the Justice Department, however, maintaining that federal overseers have overreached in their demands. With the long-sought tour complete, DOJ lawyers say they will soon return to court to force the county’s hand.

“If our lawsuit is successful, the Department would ask the Court to remedy unconstitutional conditions at the Holding Center to ensure that the jail is safe and humane,” a DOJ spokesperson said in an e-mail. “We are not seeking fines or monetary penalties, or remedies beyond the basic standards of care guaranteed by the Constitution.”