Assault In Psychiatric Facility: Nurse Let Patient Have Scissors, Privileges Had Been Revoked.

Assault In Psychiatric Facility: Nurse Let Patient Have Scissors, Privileges Had Been Revoked.

Legal Eagle Eye Newsletter for the Nursing Profession

March 2018

The facility does not dispute that the victim’s lawsuit alleges grounds to sue for the negligence of the nurse who gave the perpetrator a pair of scissors and neglected to monitor what he was doing with them. It is also true that the victim, herself an involuntarily committed psychiatric patient, had a special relationship with the facility that entitled her to protection from harm.

However, court precedents do not allow a lawsuit for violation of the victim’s Constitutional right to protection while in custody in cases involving only a negligent lapse in professional judgment. For a Constitutional rights case there must be a clearly foreseeable risk to the specific victim that the defendant intentionally ignored. UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT COLORADO January 29, 2018

The perpetrator was an involuntarily committed patient in a minimum security locked psychiatric facility. His original charge was second degree assault for stabbing his stepfather in the chest with a knife. He received probation. While on probation he left threatening messages on his probation officer’s voicemail. For that behavior he was charged with telephone threats and harassment but was found not guilty by reason of insanity and placed in the psychiatric lockup.

Eight years into his psychiatric incarceration his care plan for community reintegration allowed him time off campus for college classes and personal visits. One day while off campus he went to the home of a former fellow patient and assaulted him and two family members. The assault resulted in revocation of all his privileges at the psychiatric facility, including access to scissors, razors, knives, needles and other sharps. That and his other privileges could be restored only by a physician after a comprehensive reevaluation of the patient.

Two days after all his privileges were revoked he went to the nurses station and requested a pair of scissors, specifically a pair of pointed metal scissors with blades six to eight inches long. A nurse allowed him to sign out the scissors.

Facility policy allowed a patient with the actual privilege to check out a sharp only to take the sharp to his or her room and then return it to the nurses station. When the nurse asked the patient what he had done with the scissors he said he left them in the kitchen. Taking the scissors to the kitchen, if that was what he actually did, was a violation of policy. Then without returning the scissors the patient asked to visit a patient on a corridor other than the one where he lived. A patient needed permission to go on another residence corridor. Without further inquiry the nurse gave him permission.

The patient went to the room of a patient other than the one he said he wanted to visit, entered her room and stabbed her repeatedly with the scissors. The victim sued the facility for negligence and for violation of her Constitutional rights. The US District Court for the District of Colorado pointed out that the facility did not contest the victim’s right to sue for negligence. A nurse gave the patient scissors even though his privileges had been revoked, which the nurse knew or should have known from reading his chart. Nursing standards at the facility also called for heightened surveillance for retaliatory acting-out by any patient after the patient’s privileges were curtailed or revoked. And this patient, despite the efforts being taken toward community reintegration, was still admitting to sudden impulses to violence. Lucero v. Dodd, 2018 WL 582402 (D. Colo., January 29, 2018).