by Chuck Sharman

The U.S. District Court for the District of Hawai’i granted dismissal on September 10, 2025, to a group of mentally ill state prisoners and pretrial detainees who settled a class-action lawsuit challenging the mental healthcare they received while confined by the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (DCR), formerly known as the Department of Public Safety (DPS). The terms of the settlement affect an exhaustive list of policies related to treatment of prisoners and detainees diagnosed with severe and persistent mental illness (SPMI), as well as those not diagnosed but who had made suicide attempts.

The suit was filed by Donna Opulento on behalf of her daughter, Jessica Fortson, and by Althea Mikaele, the mother of Fortson’s fellow state prisoner Frank Hampp. Fortson, 30, fatally hanged herself in July 2017 at Women’s Community Correctional Center (WCCC) in Kailua, where she was serving a five-year sentence for credit card fraud and identity theft. Hampp, then 34, threw himself from a balcony in March 2018 at Oahu Community Correctional Center (OCCC), where he was being held on a $1 million bond after a high-speed car chase and a 17-hour standoff with cops in Waianae that ended with his arrest for attempted murder of a law enforcement officer.

As the district court later recalled, Fortson “suffered from numerous mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and borderline personality disorder.” Yet WCCC staff never put her in a mental health unit, even after a failed suicide attempt. She also told them that she was suicidal and needed treatment, but those “requests for assistance were allegedly ignored.” Instead, she was placed in solitary confinement, where she made good on her suicidal threats.

Hampp was diagnosed with “bipolar I disorder” in 2014, the district court also noted, but OCCC staff allegedly failed to provide any “mental health evaluations or medication for his disorder throughout multiple incarcerations in 2017 and 2018.” After that lack of treatment, a guard tried to move him to a different cell without restraining him first, allowing Hampp to make a dramatic jump which left him paraplegic.

Mothers File Lawsuit,
Secure Settlement

With the aid of Honolulu attorney Eric A. Seitz and co-counsel from his eponymous law office, Opulento and Mikaela filed their suit in 2019. Joined by attorneys from the Honolulu office of Dentons U.S. LLP, Seitz lodged claims for the lack of mental health treatment under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, alleging violations of the prisoners’ Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment rights, as well as the Americans with Disabilities Act, 42 U.S.C. ch.126 § 12101 et seq., and the Rehabilitation Act, 29 U.S.C. § 701 et seq. The parties notified the district court in early 2020 that they were in settlement discussions, but no agreement had been reached over two years later when Plaintiffs moved for class certification in February 2022.

The district court largely granted that motion on June 30, 2022, certifying a class consisting of “[a]ll persons who are now, or will in the future be, incarcerated in a jail or prison operated by the State of Hawaii, Department of Public Safety, and who have a Serious Mental Illness or a Serious and Persistent Mental Illness as defined by Department of Public Safety Policy No. COR.10.1G.04.” See: Opulento v. Haw. Dep’t of Pub. Safety, 2022 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 115679 (D. Haw.). Settlement discussions continued, resulting in an agreement reached by the parties in April 2025.

Under its terms, DCR agreed to a preliminary inspection of OCCC and the Halawa Correctional Facility (HCF) in June 2025, conducted by two expert Panelists whose recommendations would be adopted by the prison system subject to funding from state lawmakers. The Panelists would review all policies “pertaining to mental health inmates,” including “assessments, diagnoses, treatment plans, referral criteria, follow-up care, Hawaii State Hospital referrals, housing and re-entry.” They would also prepare a list of “training criteria and content” for both security staff and mental health and medical staff. Importantly, this included identifying “appropriate staff to sufficiently diagnose and treat [the] mentally ill population” and “recommend[ing] acceptable alternative practices when staffing is insufficient,” which it often is. The Panelists were also charged with reviewing disciplinary procedures “to ensure that behavior associated with a known diagnosis does not incur criminal charges.”

An Agreement Monitoring Panel was also included in the settlement, though its exact composition and duties were left to be negotiated later. There was no monetary amount included in the settlement except for $100,000 in fees and costs for Plaintiffs’ attorneys, subject to approval by the state legislature. See: Opulento v. Haw. Dep’t of Pub. Safety, USDC (D. Haw.), Case No. 1:19-cv-00315.

That funding was quickly secured on May 19, 2025, when state lawmakers passed HB 990, a package of appropriations totaling over $7 million. None of that will go to Hampp, even though he “suffered catastrophic injuries” and is “barely alive and is in a terrible physical condition,” Seitz told KGMB/KHNL/KFVE in Honolulu. As for Fortson, Community Alliance on Prisons coordinator Kat Brady said that “prison is about the worst thing you could do” for “people who have mental health challenges.”

“And if you want to make it really bad,” she added, “you put them in solitary.”

Panelists Issue Damning Report

The Panelists were named in May 2025. As Honolulu Civil Beat reported, they were Atlanta psychiatric expert Bhushan Agharkar and Jeffrey Metzner, who teaches forensic psychiatry at the Colorado University Anschutz School of Medicine in Denver. Their report, which the news outlet revealed in September 2025, blasted the state for the backup in its prisons of people needing treatment at the state psychiatric hospital. Worse, staffing shortages meant that what little care they received in state lockups was “provided by unlicensed clinicians without adequate supervision.” For some 300 prisoners at HCF who were prescribed psychiatric medication, there was just one psychiatrist who worked just three half-day shifts each week.

Of six clinical psychologist positions at the prison, five were vacant, and the supervisor was due to leave “in the very near future,” the report continued. OCCC had three part-time psychiatrists tending to 336 medicated patient prisoners, but three of its five slots were vacant, including the supervisor. Incredibly, the position of statewide director for the DCR mental health system has remained vacant for ten years.

At HCF, prisoners fearing for their safety in the general population were actively discouraged by staff from seeking placement in the mental health unit with its “harsh conditions of confinement” which were “designed to be a disincentive,” the report concluded. At OCCC, mentally ill prisoners remained on suicide watch for months, the Panelists found, because of “self-identified safety concerns” and not because they were “clinically suicidal.”

They also found that pepper spray was “excessively deployed” at OCCC’s Module 1, which holds prisoners whose SPMI is most acute. In addition, prison staffers had failed to conduct “psychological autopsies” required after prisoner suicides for at least two of those who killed themselves in a recent spate of six suicides in just 14 months at HCF—an extraordinarily high number for a prison holding 850 men, the report noted, given that the entire DCR system averaged just 2.6 suicides annually between 2007 and 2023 for nearly 8,600 prisoners held.

The DCR says that its official vacancy rate for guards is 24%, but the Panelists’ report said that the “functional” rate was far higher—34% after accounting for guards still employed but on long-term leave. This left prisoners on frequent lockdowns, which pose an exceptional risk to those already suffering from mental health problems. “Overcrowding and inadequate physical plants” at both HCF and OCCC caused the Panelists to assess their provision of care to SPMI prisoners and detainees as “very problematic.” 

Additional sources: Honolulu Civil Beat, KGMB/KHNL/KFVE

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