$950,000 Settlement Reached for Pennsylvania Jail Detainee Repeatedly Pepper-Sprayed During Mental Health Episodes
by Chuck Sharman
Pennsylvania’s Bucks County executed a settlement agreement on December 20, 2025, paying $950,000 to resolve claims filed by the parents of Kimberly Stringer, a mentally ill detainee who was repeatedly pepper-sprayed by guards in the county lockup while displaying signs of active mental illness during a 2020 incarceration. The incident prompted the County to set up a mental health court, and Plaintiffs Martha and Paul Stringer will also be involved in efforts to establish an Assisted Outpatient Treatment Program (AOTP), a civil process that forces adults with serious mental illness into outpatient treatment when they refuse to go voluntarily.
Stringer, 33, was incarcerated in the Bucks County Correctional Facility (BCCF) in April 2020, after striking and threatening a neighbor during a paranoid episode. Over the next 64 days, she was physically assaulted and pepper-sprayed by guards five times in response to her self-harming behavior and threats, according to the complaint later filed on her behalf. At no time was she accused of threatening guards or other jail detainees.
Yet she was also never transferred to a secure facility for treatment, leaving her in the jail at obvious risk of suicide. Guards removed her clothes to place her in a suicide smock and then removed the smock when she used it to cover her cell door window. As a result, the complaint recalled, “she was almost always naked despite being in full view of male and female corrections officers and housed on units with male inmates.”
Her mother heard about the abuse from the mom of a fellow detainee and contacted County Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia, who assured her that any reports guards had pepper-sprayed a mentally ill detainee were untrue. Two days later, on June 15, 2020, a news article was published based on eyewitness accounts of fellow detainees that gave the lie to Ellis-Marseglia’s report. Two days after that, a bed was suddenly found for Stringer at Norristown State Psychiatric Hospital, and she was transferred there from BCCF. By that point, the complaint declared, she was “in a cationic state, unable to verbally communicate and nearly entirely unresponsive.”
The charges against her were dropped in 2022. That same year, with the aid of attorney David S. Inscho of Kline & Specter in Philadelphia, Stringer’s parents filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, accusing the County, its jailers and their supervisors of violating the detainee’s civil rights with their deliberate indifference to her serious medical need. To bolster its claims against the County, the complaint cited instances of alleged pepper-spray use against other mentally ill detainees at the jail, demonstrating that what happened to Stringer was part of a pattern whereby the civil rights of at-risk people like her went ignored. The parties then proceeded to reach their settlement agreement with the payout, which included costs and fees for Plaintiffs’ attorneys. See: Stringer v. Cty. of Bucks, USDC (E.D. Pa.), Case No. 2:22-cv-01525.
The County’s own records revealed that guards twice pepper-sprayed Stringer while she was having a mental health episode and threw her in a restraint chair four times. Yet no charges were ever filed because a review of the records by County Judge Matt Weintraub found that guards did not violate protocol and treated Singer “appropriately and fairly.” Her parents held a different view and told the Bucks County Courier-Times that they pursued their claim anyway because “she should not have been subjected to these uses of force when it was known that she had a severe mental illness.”
In 2021, the County established its Mental Health Court, which is an effort to divert mentally ill arrestees on non-violent charges away from jail and into treatment programs. Construction was also begun on a $15 million, 24-bed treatment facility, which will open later in 2026 and provide secure treatment for arrestees experiencing mental health crisis or drug withdrawal. County Commissioners are also exploring implementing the ATOP; though not a part of the Stringer’s settlement, they are involved in the effort, for which Martha Stringer said that she and her husband were “grateful.” They plan to put the settlement proceeds in trust for their daughter’s ongoing treatment because “[s]he will need support … for the rest of her life.”
Additional source: Bucks County Courier-Times
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Related legal case
Stringer v. Cty. of Bucks
| Year | 2022 |
|---|---|
| Cite | USDC (E.D. Pa.), Case No. 2:22-cv-01525 |
| Level | District Court |