$939,000 for Nevada Prisoner Left in Wheelchair by Delayed Back Pain Treatment
by Anthony W. Accurso
Nevada agreed to pay state prisoner Charles Morris $939,000 on May 16, 2025, resolving his claims that state Department of Corrections (DOC) failed to provide him back timely surgery, resulting in a fall which required emergency surgery and left him bound to a wheelchair. Morris’ civil rights suit had proceeded to trial in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada, where a jury awarded him $1.25 million in August 2024. However, the DOC appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which sent the parties to mediation, resulting in the settlement.
Morris was committed to the DOC in 1999. By 2006, he was transferred to a “medical flat yard” due to mobility issues arising from problems with the lumbar region of his spine. He received x-ray imaging in 2008, which diagnosed “structural abnormalities,” but nothing was done for his condition. The DOC even refused to provide an MRI, despite a doctor’s recommendation. Morris began the grievance process to object in 2015, but he was still denied an MRI “due to [his] weight,” as he recalled in the complaint he later filed.
After he was moved to Southern Desert Correctional Center and seen by a different doctor, Morris finally got an MRI, which confirmed spinal misalignment and “disk/nerve impingement.” The doctor recommended corrective surgery for Morris, who by this time was suffering spasms that caused “his legs to go numb and collapse.”
However, the DOC continued to delay surgery. Responses to his grievances attempted to reassure Morris that he was perpetually “3-4 weeks” from being provided surgery by DOC medical staff. He was additionally told that “[t]here is a wait for outside appointments.”
Around this time, Morris was moved again, and the DOC failed to “adhere to [its] well established policy relating to transfers of inmates”—that they should be moved “with their entire medical file,” as his complaint also recalled. In turn, this further “contributed to unnecessary delays in obtaining needed medical assistance.” He didn’t get a bottom-bunk pass until fall 2017. By October of that year, he was provided a walker and cane. He was prescribed “medications” to treat his pain, which included “muscle rub,” but he later described these as “blatantly inadequate,” amounting “to no treatment at all.”
After a minor disciplinary infraction, Morris was moved to a different unit and was assigned to an upper bunk, despite the earlier lower bunk restriction. For five months he managed the top bunk, in a unit with stairs. Unsurprisingly, he eventually fell on February 2, 2018, and was transported to Carson Tahoe Medical Center. There he was provided emergency surgery, but he was told by doctors at Carson that “he may never regain full mobility and feeling due to the damage [that] the years of bone pressure impinging on the nerves has caused.”
He then filed his complaint under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, accusing the DOC and its personnel of “deliberate indifference to a serious medical need through medically unjustified delay of surgery” and by “ignoring a long-standing bottom tier classification which [culminated] in a fall and serious injury.”
When the case proceeded to trial, a jury awarded him a total of $1.25 million, including: $500,000 based on the actions of David Mar, a “member UPN panel/screener”; another $500,000 based on the actions of Dr. Richard Long, an “ortho specialist contractor” for the DOC; and $250,000 more for the actions of Shelley Conlin, a “correctional caseworker.”
Defendants moved for judgment notwithstanding the verdict, which the district court denied in December 2024. They then turned to the Ninth Circuit, which ordered the parties into mediation, resulting in their settlement agreement. Under its terms, $500 was paid by the DOC and the remaining $938,500 was paid by the state’s Tort Fund. The payout included costs and fees for Morris’ attorneys, Paola M. Armeni and Gia Marina of Clark Hill PLC in Las Vegas. See: Morris v. Aranas, USDC (D. Nev.), Case No. 3:18-cv-00310.
The state Board of Examiners—Gov. Joe Lombardo, Attorney General Aaron Ford (D) and Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar (D)—approved the payout on July 8, 2025. Morris stated in his claim that he remains “partially paralyzed on his left side” as a result of the fall he suffered, and that he will likely endure “constant limited mobility” and severe back pain for the rest of his life. “No amount of money will make Mr. Morris whole,” Armeni told the Nevada Independent. “He is wheelchair bound in his 40’s due to the lack of medical care he was provided by [the DOC].” The prison system offered no comment.
Additional source: Nevada Independent
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Related legal case
Morris v. Aranas
| Year | 2024 |
|---|---|
| Cite | USDC (D. Nev.), Case No. 3:18-cv-00310 |
| Level | District Court |