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Legal Liability Trends for Correctional Suicides (2012)

"Deaths in correctional custody, including inmate suicides, often lead to civil lawsuits against officers and administrators. The landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Estelle v. Gamble (1976) established that inmates could sue if harmed while corrections personnel showed deliberate indifference. This legal standard was refined in Farmer v. Brennan (1994), a decision that held inmates must prove that correctional personnel knew about a “strong likelihood” of risk that threatened the prisoner’s health or safety and consciously and recklessly disregarded it. Although these cases did not specifically address prisoner suicide, lower courts have applied the legal standard of deliberate indifference to this issue."

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