Family Awarded $2.5 Million in Prisoner’s Jail Death

A San Fernando Superior Court jury Monday awarded $2.5 million to the widow and children of a North Hollywood man who died in jail after Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies ignored a court order to take him to a hospital for medical treatment and instead strapped him to a cot.

The unanimous verdict in the lawsuit against the county came after eight days of deliberations.

Stanley Malinovitz, 38, died from a blood clot in his lung Jan. 28, 1984, five days after he was arrested for elbowing an elderly woman to the ground in a shopping mall--part of a pattern of strange behavior he exhibited shortly before his death. His wife, Sue, and two children, now 14 and 10, sued the county for unspecified damages in a civil trial that began Oct. 18.

Two days before Malinovitz died, San Fernando Municipal Court Commissioner Charles L. Peven had postponed Malinovitz’s scheduled arraignment and ordered sheriff’s deputies to take him to County-USC Medical Center after deputies found him lying naked and dazed in the court’s holding cell.

However, Allan F. Grossman, the family’s attorney, told the jury that the deputies instead returned Malinovitz to the Men’s Central Jail, where they left him strapped by the wrists and ankles to an iron cot for 40 hours.

Deputy County Counsel Philip S. Miller said jail administrators never received the order to take Malinovitz to the hospital because a court clerk kept it on his desk instead of sending it to the jail.

Sue Malinovitz testified that she went to the hospital to await her husband’s arrival. She said that, over the course of several hours, she called the jail repeatedly, asking where her husband was. Her calls went unheeded, she said.

Grossman argued that Malinovitz’s death could have been prevented had he been given appropriate medical care. He said Malinovitz, a family man with no criminal record, displayed erratic behavior that should have alerted deputies that he was ill.

During the trial, witnesses testified that Malinovitz was behaving bizarrely, had face and arm injuries, bruises on his back and stomach and dried blood in his ear after he arrived at the jail. Grossman alleged that Malinovitz’s injuries were inflicted by arresting officers who beat him with a baton and gripped him in a chokehold to subdue him.

Miller argued that Malinovitz would have died even if deputies had taken him to a hospital because doctors there would not have detected the blood clot. He said Malinovitz’s strange behavior stemmed from a mental illness and was not a symptom of the blood clot that killed him.