$280,000 Paid for South Carolina Detainee’s Death in Charleston Jail
by Chuck Sharman
Under a settlement reached in the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina, Charleston County agreed to pay $280,000 to resolve claims filed by the Estate of Julian Jenkins, a detainee who died six days after his incarceration in the County’s Al Cannon Detention Center (ACDC) in March 2023.
Jenkins, 50, had been picked up on a three-year old warrant for theft of a $97 vacuum cleaner. Found to be in extremely poor health—he was not only on dialysis for late-stage kidney failure but also suffering congestive heart failure, hypertension and hypothyroidism—he was placed in the jail infirmary under the care of its contracted private healthcare provider, Wellpath LLC. Its staffers noted in Jenkins’ chart on March 10, the day after his arrest, that his condition was unstable and recommended sending him to a hospital emergency room.
But that didn’t happen. Nor did it happen three days later, when the weekend ended and the staffers returned to work at the infirmary, repeating their recommendation. Jenkins was found unresponsive in his cell the following morning and pronounced dead. An autopsy blamed the death on “natural causes,” specifically “congestive heart failure and chronic renal failure,” as the district court heard from Estate attorney Christopher P. Kenney.
After a hearing, the district court approved the settlement on December 23, 2025. But it wasn’t until several months later that the hearing transcript became available, laying out the Estate’s rationale for accepting an amount that Kenney admitted was “insufficient in terms of the loss of a human life and the pain of the family.”
The timing of Jenkins’ death preceded by just a few months an investigation opened by the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) into allegations that the jail was “structurally unsafe,” resulting in “sexual assaults, homicides and prevalent violence,” as PLN reported. [See PLN, Apr. 2024, p.34.] Kenney told the district court that his investigation disproved media reports tying Jenkins’ death to problems that the DOJ was investigating; rather, he said, there was in this case “no negligence, gross negligence, or deliberate indifference on the part of the detention staff and the Charleston County Sheriff,” who at the time was Kristin Graziano.
The culprit, Kenney continued, was Wellpath, against whom the Estate had lodged claims of a pattern or practice of providing unconstitutional care to detainees, making the firm itself liable for resulting injury and death under Monell v. Dep’t of Soc. Servs., 436 U.S. 658 (1978). But Wellpath declared bankruptcy in November 2024, as PLN also reported; when it exited the following year, the prison medical profiteer had successfully capped its exposure in suits filed for detainees and prisoners at a total of just $15.5 million. [See: PLN, May 2025, p.56.]
As a result, Kenney said he believed “that in order to recover any amount of money for statutory beneficiaries or the Estate in this case, we would have to get a judgment in excess of $8 million”—an unlikely award even from a sympathetic jury when the victim was a man as sick as Jenkins was. “It is not clear to me that we would be able to prove … to a standard of proof more likely than not that but for the care of the defendant, the lack of care in this case, that Mr. Jenkins would have survived from his chronic heart disease and renal failure.”
Accordingly, the district court adopted the parties’ settlement and ordered the County to pay a total of $280,000 to the Estate. That included $93,333.33 in fees and $31,127.88 in costs to Kenney and fellow attorney Carl L. Soloman, each of their eponymous Columbia firms, along with a third Estate attorney, Edward K. Pritchard III of Pritchard Law in Charleston. An additional $30,000 was earmarked for Plaintiff Lois Taylor, including a $25,000 fee for serving as Personal Representative of her son’s Estate; the other $5,000 went to cover other expenses related to his death, including a $678.32 Medicare lien. The remaining $125,538.79 was split evenly between Jenkins’ beneficiaries, Julian Jenkins, Jr. and Denisha Marshall. See: Taylor v. Charleston Cty., USDC (D.S.C.), Case No. 4:25-cv-01162.
The DOJ investigation into the ACDC stalled shortly after it was opened, when Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) was elected and his appointees took over the agency—including a new U.S. Attorney for the state, former state Department of Corrections chief Brian Stirling. Also stalled was an investigation opened at the same time into Richland County’s Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center in Columbia.
“Walking away from these investigations, without even an explanation, betrays the people who trusted the system,” declared Allen Chaney, Legal Director of the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Additional source: ACLU-South Carolina
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