Erik Heipt

Terrill Thomas, a 38-year-old Milwaukee man with a history of bipolar disorder, died of dehydration in the Milwaukee County Jail in April 2016 after a jail lieutenant ordered the water to his cell shut off for a week as punishment for flooding a previous cell. He lost 34 pounds before he was found dead on April 24, 2016. His estate sued Milwaukee County and the jail's medical contractor, Armor Correctional Health Services, in federal court, and the case settled in March 2019 for $6.75 million, split $5 million from the county and $1.75 million from Armor. The money was divided among Thomas's six children, several of them minors.

Larry Price Jr. spent just over a year in the Sebastian County, Arkansas jail awaiting trial on a terroristic threatening charge he could not make $1,000 bail on, and was found dead in his cell on August 29, 2021. He weighed 185 pounds when he was booked, and paramedics who responded to his death estimated his weight at about 90 pounds; the Arkansas State Crime Laboratory listed the cause of death as acute dehydration and malnutrition. His family's federal lawsuit alleged that Sebastian County and its jail medical contractor, Turn Key Health Clinics, LLC, ignored his deteriorating mental and physical condition, including discontinuing his psychiatric medication and failing to intervene as he ate and drank less over months in custody. Represented by Erik Heipt and Edwin Budge of Budge & Heipt, the family settled with both defendants in 2024 for $6 million, split evenly between the county and Turn Key. The county prosecutor filed no criminal charges over the death, and the case settled before trial with no ruling on liability.

A federal jury in Spokane awarded $26.75 million to the estate of Cindy Lou Hill, a 55-year-old woman who died of a perforated intestine in the Spokane County Jail after NaphCare staff attributed her symptoms to heroin withdrawal, though the Ninth Circuit vacated the $24 million punitive portion in 2025 and the case was dismissed on remand.

On January 30, 2017, Lynnwood police officer Zachary Yates fired ten shots at 36-year-old Jeremy Dowell, a Mountlake Terrace man with mental health issues who was carrying a knife on Highway 99, and killed him. Investigators concluded the shooting was within legal standards and prosecutors declined to charge Yates, but twelve witnesses later signed sworn declarations contradicting the official account, ten of them saying Yates kept firing at a stumbling or already fallen Dowell. Dowell's estate and his parents sued Yates individually for excessive force in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in May 2018. The parties settled on August 31, 2018, and Lynnwood's insurance risk pool paid $1.75 million in late September under the city's obligation to defend the officer, with no admission of wrongdoing.