When a loudspeaker at the Stillwater prison ordered inmates to the front of their cells for a head count one day in 2022, at least one inmate failed to show up. He couldn’t hear the announcement.
Jamie Richardson, 61, was supposed to receive a pager alert under a prison policy that requires equal notice to all deaf and hard-of-hearing inmates. But, Richardson contended in a lawsuit, the guard charged with paging him did not send the alert, and the prisoner received a written warning.
“My client was disciplined because they said, ‘Well, you didn’t show up at the front of your cell when we called for it,’ and it’s like, ‘I didn’t hear it’ and nobody paged him,” said Sonja Peterson, a staff attorney with the Minnesota Disability Law Center. ”How is he supposed to know?”
An ensuing settlement between Richardson, fellow inmate Timothy Allen Lake and the Minnesota Department of Corrections (DOC) was intended to fix the problem. But in a recent interview at Stillwater’s visitor room, Richardson said communications problems persist weeks after the settlement went into effect. Some guards continue to not send him pages, Richardson said.
“I would say the ones that were good are still good, and the ones that are bad are still bad,” Richardson said.
DOC spokesman Aaron Swanum said new communications protocols agreed to in the settlement were communicated to Stillwater guards on July 1. It required pager messages for general announcements to be sent immediately after a loudspeaker announcement.
“The DOC is committed to accommodating the known physical and/or mental disabilities of incarcerated people and juvenile residents so that they may participate in departmental programming, services, and activities,” Swanum said in a statement.
Richardson was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison in 2002 after he shot and killed the ex-husband of a woman whom Richardson was in a relationship with in Two Harbors. He was also convicted of kidnapping, assault and being a felon in possession of a gun, court records show. Richardson said his hearing loss became worse after he was shot in the head by police during a standoff following the killing.